Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Watch curator Mark Godfrey and Christie's specialist Katharine Arnold discuss Gerhard Richter’s 1984 masterpiece, 'Schober (Haybarn)' — a countryside view rendered with atmospheric brilliance — leading the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale.
Previously in the renowned collection of Emily and Jerry Spiegel, the work marks Richter’s turn toward softly blurred landscapes that appear photographic from afar, but dissolve into abstraction up close. It was created during a period of creative ambition and new romance for the artist. Through pastoral greens, hazy blues and terracotta tones, we experience Richter’s vision of the land, with nature and culture interacting in living colour.
As Dieter Schwarz, co-curator of Richter’s major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, writes: ‘the picture becomes transformed from the present to the remembered, from the real to the imagined.’
📍20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale | 5 March
Watch curator Mark Godfrey and Christie's specialist Katharine Arnold discuss Gerhard Richter’s 1984 masterpiece, 'Schober (Haybarn)' — a countryside view rendered with atmospheric brilliance — leading the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale.
Previously in the renowned collection of Emily and Jerry Spiegel, the work marks Richter’s turn toward softly blurred landscapes that appear photographic from afar, but dissolve into abstraction up close. It was created during a period of creative ambition and new romance for the artist. Through pastoral greens, hazy blues and terracotta tones, we experience Richter’s vision of the land, with nature and culture interacting in living colour.
As Dieter Schwarz, co-curator of Richter’s major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, writes: ‘the picture becomes transformed from the present to the remembered, from the real to the imagined.’
📍20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale | 5 March
