For centuries, artists have been captivated by clouds, from Titian and J.M.W. Turner to Georgia O’Keeffe, Nobuyoshi Araki and Gerhardt Richter, whose sublime cloudscape from 1978 is pictured here. The painting forms part of his breathtakingly realistic series Wolken, carried out between 1968 and 1979, which served as a key precursor to his photorealist cycles of the 1980s. Indeed, as Sotheby’s have aptly observed, “the clouds are caught in a moment of confrontation between the painterly and the photographic, the representative and the abstract, the natural and the supernatural”—with magical results.
