Among the most frequent images in Richter's hyperrealist work, besides the landscapes and still lifes with flowers, are the ones of a woman alone, her back turned or engaged in everyday activities like reading or looking after her children. A thematic group that began with works such as the famous Betty (1988). As in the case of the abstract paintings, these works are characterised by a cold, distant and out of focus style, far from the heroic rhetoric of the Expressionists, although they never renounce beauty.
Based on photographs, these realist works are not studies of what is true to life, but autonomous works that speak of themselves. The figure, in this case the naked woman we see with her back turned and her lead leaning forward, becomes a statement or emblem of the metaphorical possibilities of painting. The character is facing an ambiguous, fuzzy space, perhaps a door but also a geometrical abstraction, which suggests that the soul of the picture is something more than a list of its physical characteristics. Richter is referring here to questions of presence or mystery, although he is doing so from an analysis or an objective reflection on the nature of the pictorial. His works are not the fruit of inspired improvisation, but of a will to obtain imperishable images brimming over with meaning from phenomena that can be verified, such as the balance of composition and colour and the shaded, mysterious light. The domestic scale of the paintings also suggests the poetic potential of the everyday.
