ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes something of a small history of abstraction in painting in which abstract mark-making makes contact with destruction, death, dissolution—or threats of the same—but which, partly as already engaged with such threats, reworks meanings given to terror and terrorism. Turning to what is perhaps the most renowned series of paintings concerning terrorism, Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 of 1988, if also to his less well-known series Stammheim from 1994, there is a recurrence of re-inscriptions of terror and terrorism that reverts to abstraction even while operating in relation to spaces of contention concerning representations of terrorism—and this more obviously than the work by Kandinsky. While speaking out against political terrorism, Richter has also admitted to an ambivalence stemming partly from the very ‘hate fantasy,’ as he put it, that the series serves, of putting the dead terrorists and their accoutrements on show.
