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In 1990, Gerhard Richter made this diptych on a large-scale, achieved by the physical juxtaposition of two separate canvases. Behind layers of white and red, there is an original image that has been blurred out of legibility. However, the elements in the painting are not meant to represent any object or phenomenon of physical reality. On the surface, this painting boasts a range of vertical scratches made of paint. Richter was no stranger to the art of adapting photographs. When I migrated from East to West Germany in 1961 and got introduced to the world of flux art, he experimented with black-and-white photographs for advertisements. There’s a kind of blurring effect in this “Abstract Picture” that is reminiscent of how Richter would smudge the borders of those photographic paintings he made in the 1960s. Art critic Richard Cork even went on to claim that he believed the blurry effect in his painting as a reflection of traffic signals, rainfall and concrete roads in an urban setting.