Gagosian Gallery presents a group of four tapestries entitled Abdu, Iblan, Musa, and Yusuf (all 2009) by Gerhard Richter in 2013. This is the exhibition catalog of it.

These works are based on Abstract Painting (724-4) (1990), a key example of Richter’s distinctive approach to non-representational painting. The visual effect of the tapestries is a Rorschach-like multiplying of the forms and colors of the original canvas.

Woven on a mechanical jacquard loom, each tapestry repeats four times the image of one quadrant of the painting. Somewhat surprisingly, the painterly, stochastic qualities of the original translate onto the loom’s digital iterations. Though derived from the same painting, each of the four tapestries surprises and dazzles with its own complex symmetries. In Abdu, a cobalt blue supernova erupts into a sea of overlapping reds, mixed whites, and yellows; while Iblan is a layered vision of lilacs and midnight blues that emanates from a bright white center. Within a delicate red top-layer, some marks appear to have been finger-painted; given such refined illusions of gesture it is easy to forget that the works do not employ paint at all.