Some artists use stripes as a way to measure space. Some use them as rhythm, structure, pattern, discipline, refusal, or optical vibration. With Morris Louis, the stripe begins somewhere else. It begins with liquid paint, raw canvas, gravity, and a room too small for the scale of what he wanted to make.

The stiped “paintings” don't start with a stripe. They start with one of Richter's own 1990 squeegee paintings, Abstraktes Bild 724-4, thick, layered, full of the physical residue of paint dragged over paint. Richter had that painting photographed, then ran the image through a digital process: split down the middle, mirrored, split again, mirrored again, two bands become four, four become eight, on and on, until the whole dense surface had been reduced to thousands of thin lines of color, then stretched horizontally. Paint became data. Gesture became a line. A surface became a sequence.