Hermes Black Matte Porosus Crocodile Birkin 40cm Palladium Hardware ARTBURO Personalization, Gerhard Richter "Abstraktes Bild" (1986) and St John (1988) on the backside.

Hermes Black Birkin 40cm of matte porosus crocodile leather with palladium hardware.

This Birkin has tonal stitching, a front toggle closure, a clochette with lock and two keys, and double rolled handles.

The interior is lined with Black chevre and has one zip pocket with an Hermes engraved zipper pull and an open pocket on the opposite side.

Collection: R square

Origin: France

Condition: Mint (the feet still have plastic); no plastic on hardware; no visible signs of use

Accompanied by: Hermes box, Hermes dustbag, clochette, lock, keys, clochette dustbag, felt, CITES and rainhat

Measurements: 15.75" width x 12.75" height x 8" depth; 4.25" handle drop

ART :  Gerhard Richter "Abstraktes Bild" (1986) and St John (1988)

ABSTRAKTES BILD

signed, dated 1986 and numbered 599 on the reverse

oil on canvas

300.5 by 250.5cm.; 118 3/8 by 98 5/8 in. 

Texture, colour and structure are deployed in Abstraktes Bild with spectacular force and sensitivity to engender a seductive painterly synthesis visually aligned to an exquisite and strikingly atmospheric evocation: structural strips and impastoed ridges of thick oil paint delineate a schema of painterly revelations and under layers of diaphanous blue, green and purple that are punctuated with sunset flashes of yellow, orange, red and pink. Invoking an utterly self-referential language of abstraction, Abstraktes Bild nonetheless shares aesthetic and atmospheric congruencies with Monet’s late Nympheas, Gustav Klimt’s jewel-like treatment of the Austrian landscape, and Seurat’s proto-scientific treatment of light and colour. Indeed, Richter’s breathtaking Abstraktes Bild captures an atmosphere akin to a post impressionistic translation of landscape scenery. 

Gerhard Richter’s unprecedented art of abstraction stands as ultimate culmination to the epic journey of his career, during which he has ceaselessly interrogated the limits of representation, the nature of perception and the operations of visual cognition. Variously evoking something of Monet’s translation of his garden at Giverny, Rothko’s exuberance of transformative colour, Kline’s structural expressionism, Pollock’s instigation of autonomous composition, and de Kooning’s transferal of the figural to the abstract, Richter’s abstraction is ultimately without comparison. Herein, the vast expanse of Asbtraktes Bild is utterly replete with the most spectacular colour, form and texture; a sheer cliff face of unadulterated expression as delivered by the world’s greatest living painter. Within the field of this canvas, acts of unfathomable chaos have touched something not quite of this realm, creating, in short, something that is phenomenal.

ST JOHN

signed, dated 1988, 200 cm x 260 cm

Catalogue Raisonné: 653-4

Oil on canvas

St John belongs to a series called the ‘London Paintings’, each named after one of the chapels of Westminster Abbey. The titles are not meant to be descriptive, but refer merely to associations connected with the artist’s visits to London. Since 1980 Richter made his abstract paintings by manipulating spatulas of different lengths, loaded with paint, across areas of the canvas so new layers of colour cover earlier ones. Richter’s inability to control the precise distribution of paint allows a degree of chance to determine the paintings’ final appearance.