Floor 4: Gerhard Richter (exiting Flavin)

Visual Description

A horizontally oriented, oil-on-linen painting about the size of an average wall poster presents a portrait of a woman, artist Brigid Polk, from the waist up in a shadowy interior. The painting gives an overall appearance of a photographic portrait.

The woman's pale face sits slightly right of center, and her body and head are tilted sideways to our right. There are many blurry transitions and fogged edges; the woman's tousled, dark-blonde hair fans outward to the right edge in loose strands as if in mid hair flip. Her eyes, a bright light-blue, are clear points of color and focus, looking directly at us. Her left hand rises in the foreground with slender fingers; an index finger touches or hovers at her lips. She wears a dark garment that blends into the surrounding area, with a lighter patch of skin visible along the left side where her right arm emerges from the darkness. The background dissolves into hazy blocks of deep green-gray and brown, with a vague vertical pale form near the upper right resembling a lit room or window.

The painting is in a white wood frame.

Visual Description

A vertically oriented, grayscale, oil-on-linen painting about the size of an average wall poster depicts a woman in an interior, rendered with heavy blur and soft edges that suggest motion.

Positioned at center-left, this young woman—who has light skin and short, tousled, dark-blonde hair—turns her head back toward the left while her left arm reaches straight up and backward, extending toward the upper portion of the composition. This midair pose implies a jump or a dance-like stretch, with the body arcing and the legs tapering into faintly defined feet at the bottom right. Her eyes are wide and surrounded by shadowing, her eyebrows arched, and her mouth is slightly parted in a broad smile.

She wears a loose and billowy short-sleeved dark top that drapes and bunches around the torso, as well as dark garment on her pelvis shaped like underwear or possibly the bottom of a leotard. Her bare legs extend diagonally down toward the lower right, elongated and pale against the darker tones.

Behind her, the background is an abstracted interior space: a broad horizontal band crosses the upper third like a wall molding or ledge, and below it, a lighter rectangular field suggests a paneled wall surface. The overall palette stays within cool grays. The painting is in a white frame.

Visual Description

A vertically oriented, oil-on-linen painting about the size of an average wall poster presents a softly blurred, grayscale portrait of an adult man with light skin from the chest up, framed within a broad, off-white painted border.

The man's head and shoulders are turned slightly toward our left, with his gaze directed off to our left as well, giving a neutral expression. His hair is short and dark, combed back from a high forehead, and his facial features—eyes, nose, and mouth—are rendered with softened edges. His eyes are light in tone. He wears a light-colored suit jacket over a darker collared shirt; the shirt buttons are faintly visible but hazy.

Across the entire image, thin horizontal bands and streaks run from left to right. The background is a pale gray field with no defined setting. A uniform painted margin extends around all four edges, creating precise, clean edges where the portrait stops and framing the entire portrait like a photograph. The painting is set within a white frame.

Visual Description

A large, oil-on-linen painting (about eleven feet tall by eight feet wide) presents a dense field of horizontal streaks and scraped bands, dominated by deep navy, teal, and sea-green tones punctuated with flashes of orange and gold. The surface is built from many thin, lateral passes of paint that create a striated, watery texture, as if reflections are rippling across the canvas. Along the left edge, a broad, dark vertical mass—almost black-blue—anchors the composition, with adjacent drips and broken, ladder-like traces of orange that descend irregularly.

Across the upper half, scattered orange and pale peach marks appear like fragmented highlights, interrupted by cooler blue zones and occasional pale, misty veils where paint has been dragged thin. A soft, faint horizontal line near the middle suggests a subtle divide, with the lower half becoming heavier and darker, especially toward the lower left, where navy and black pool into thicker, more opaque areas. Toward the right side, translucent layers shift into muted olive, tan, and sandy beige, with rectangular, blocky passages and scraped edges that contrast with the more fluid streaking elsewhere.

The overall effect evokes shimmering light on water or an urban night reflection, rendered through layered abrasion, smearing, and flickering color.

Visual Description

A large oil-on-canvas painting—higher than a tall adult, and about as wide as their outstretched arms—is filled edge-to-edge with dense, abstract layers of teal-green, black, and white paint. Broad horizontal strokes appear scraped or dragged so that bands of pale gray-white break through darker green-black fields. Over these horizontal sweeps, thin vertical lines and drips descend in multiple places—some dark and inky, others tinged with green—forming a loose grid.

The left half contains an interlacing of white and green with intermittent black patches, the marks fragmenting into small, jagged shapes reflecting how the paint was pulled with a squeegee and then interrupted. Near the upper center, a slightly lighter zone interrupts the darker green, with small flecks of pale blue and white embedded in the layered surface. On the right half, the paint is swept more broadly, with a large swath of muted green-gray and white that looks brushed sideways, and several darker, dripping vertical trails cut through it. Scattered throughout are small, sharp notes of color—rusty reds and occasional ochre-gold flashes—especially around the mid-to-lower areas, where they peek from beneath the heavier green-black layers. The bottom third deepens into darker greens and blacks, with white streaks and scraped passages breaking through.

Visual Description

Spanning over six feet tall and thirteen feet wide—about the size of a home theater screen—this oil-on-linen work is organized into four joined vertical canvases, each containing three vertically stacked rectangular areas of gray painting that are framed by white-painted borders. Together these elements create the illusion of a series of windows that cast shadows onto a wall or flat surface somewhere behind them.

Each canvas has a painted white border that extends with a consistent width around the panel and between the three painted rectangles. Inside each of the twelve rectangles—which are defined by clean straight edges—are hazy, soft-focus bands of a deep charcoal gray set over a cool, pale gray that subtly shifts in tone with gentle gradient. The dark bands form cross-like intersections.

The size of the represented dark bands and light areas corresponds to the size of the white margins (the window sills) and rectangular painted areas (the windowpanes), but the shadows and cast light are shifted down and to the right. The overall effect is of light passing through the white gridded windowpane structure from above and casting a charcoal gray gridded shadow that falls to the right with diffuse edges.

A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.

Visual Description

Spanning roughly seven feet tall by thirteen feet wide—about the size of a small movie theater screen—this painting presents a horizontal rectangular grid of 256 small blocks of solid color arranged in sixteen rows and sixteen columns framed by white borders.

Each swatch-like unit of color is a flat rectangle, wider than tall, with a smooth, glossy surface and crisp edges. These are distributed across the canvas with no apparent order. Some colors repeat throughout the overall painting, but there is no discernible pattern to their repetition. The colors include a wide spectrum of hues and tones. These include pale lilac, dusty pink, bright magenta, teal, turquoise, sky blue, deep navy, forest green, lime, chartreuse, mustard yellow, orange, brick red, maroon, chocolate brown, charcoal, and near-black. The color rectangles are separated from one another by consistent narrow white gaps that create a uniform lattice. A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.

Visual Description

A nearly ten-foot-square oil painting on linen—about the width of a standard single-car garage door, but taller—depicts a wide view of a seashore beneath a vast, cloud-laden sky. The composition is divided roughly in half by a straight horizon line, stretching unbroken from left to right, where a thin strip of pale pink and lavender light appears just above the water. Above this band, a clear blue sky is visible, and above that dense, pinkish-gray cloud masses sweep in from the upper right corner and stretch across the top, with misty areas of lightened cloud near the upper center.

Below the horizon, the sea is rendered in subdued tones of slate blue, gray, and muted brown, with a faint sheen of reflected light on the water near the horizon line. The water surface is smooth and slightly blurred, transitioning into gentle wave patterns closer to the foreground. In the lower half, low, dark rock formations form irregular lines and small protrusions; thin white foam traces around them in broken arcs and streaks. The very bottom edge deepens into near-black and contrasts with the luminous horizon and the brighter sky.

The entire painting has a smooth, flat surface, with no visible brushmarks or evidence of the artist's hand, giving it the quality of a photograph.

A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.