1025 Colours, 1974
Oil on canvas
120 x 124 cm
Private Collection

Richter began making colour chart paintings in 1966. He recalls noticing a colour chart one day and realising that 'it looks like a painting. It's wonderful.' The charts provided anonymous and impersonal source material, a way for Richter to disassociate colour from any traditional, descriptive, symbolic or expressive end. Returning to colour charts in the 1970s, Richter changed his focus from the readymade to the conceptual system, developing mathematical procedures for mixing colours and chance operations for their placement. He said: 'I found it interesting to tie chance to a totally rigid order.'

4096 Colours, 1974
Enamel on canvas
254 x 254 cm
Private Collection

The 4096 colour charts were Richter’s last and most ambitious. In 1973 he began to work with colour multiples of four, mixing each of the three primaries with green, to create a quantity of colours equal to the number of units he desired in each work: 'The multiplier four was necessary because I wanted to keep the image size, the square size, and the number of squares in a constant proportion to each other.' Between 1973 and 1974 he made twenty-six paintings with grids of 4, 16, 64, 256, 1024 and 4096 units, with and without white interstices.