Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter appears here not through biography or a sequence of life events, but as an artist whose paintings give visible form to a philosophical problem: how a shift in perspective can make an image pass from apparent realism into abstraction, or from abstraction into recognizable representation. The importance of his work lies in this unstable passage. It makes the difference between ways of seeing, rather than either style alone, the subject of the painting.

Identity and Place in the Argument

Richter is introduced as a contemporary painter whose work moves between photographic realism and abstract color stains. The movement is reciprocal: an image can leave a slightly transposed or blurred photographic likeness for abstraction, while an apparently objectless field of stains can suddenly become realist representation. These are not presented as unrelated kinds of painting. Richter’s significance lies in attending to the moment when one becomes the other.

That focus makes him an example in an argument about parallax: the decisive shift may occur not in the object itself but in the viewer’s attitude toward it. His paintings bring the instability of representation into view without resolving it into a single, final style.

The Passage Between Image and Abstraction

The book characterizes Richter’s subject as the nearly imperceptible interval in which a picture emerges from chaos—or, in the reverse movement, a clear mirror-image blurs into stains that no longer yield a stable representation. The transformation matters because the viewer encounters more than a change of visible material. The familiar opposition between a legible image and an abstract field becomes uncertain: each can tip into the other, as though the painting had turned over along a Möbius strip.

In this account, the objet petit a names the elusive X that makes a consistent pictorial representation emerge from a texture of stains. The concept identifies no additional figure hidden behind the image; it marks the hard-to-isolate point around which the image coheres. Richter’s paintings make that coherence seem contingent: representation is achieved, but its arrival does not erase the abstract field from which it came.

Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Richter’s reversals unsettle the assumption that photographic realism is simply the more immediate or natural mode. The book instead describes his realist images as artificial and constructed, while finding a stronger sense of natural life in the interplay of abstract shapes and stains. From this angle, identifiable representation can lead into a fantasy-space in which reality is lost, rather than bring the viewer closer to reality. The shift is parallactic: what changes is the viewing position, not necessarily the object.

This is why Richter is not treated as simply a postmodern artist. His work is described as a metacommentary on the split and passage between modernism and postmodernism. The comparison with Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle readymade and Kazimir Malevich’s black square sharpens the point: those works mark opposing extremes of modernist art, while Richter’s practice is understood as pursuing the passage between them, from photographic realism toward the abstraction of minimal formal distinction.

Theoretical Significance

Richter’s example resonates with the book’s account of Hegelian negativity. The division between appearance and what lies beyond it need not be overcome by discovering a final, fully unified reality. A shift in perspective can instead disclose that the division itself belongs to reality: the gap is not merely an obstacle in the viewer’s knowledge but part of what the work makes visible. Richter’s movement between realism and abstraction gives that claim a pictorial form.

The same emphasis on noncoincidence informs the book’s broader account of concrete universality, where a universal is not a neutral container shared by its particular forms but persists in their irreducible tension. Richter’s work is significant within this argument because it does not simply choose between photographic likeness and abstraction. It holds attention on their unstable relation, making the passage between them—not either pole in isolation—the central artistic and philosophical event.