Gerhard Richter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gerhard Richter (born February 9, 1932) is a German artist.
Richter is considered by some critics as one of the most
important German artists of the post-World War II period and is
also one of the world's most expensive, with his paintings often
selling for several million dollars apiece.
Richter was born in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up in Reichenau,
Lower Silesia, and in Waltersdorf in the Upper Lusatian
countryside. He left school after tenth grade and apprenticed as
an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the
Dresden Art Academy. In 1948 he terminated the higher
professional school in Zittau, and, between 1949 and 1951, was
trained there in writing as well as in stage and advertising
painting. In 1950 his application for membership in the
Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (Dresden University of
Visual Arts, founded in 1764) was rejected. He finally began his
study at the Dresden Academy of Arts in 1951. His teachers were
Karl von Appen, Ulrich Lohmar and Will Grohmann. In these early
days of his career he prepared a wall painting ("Communion with
Picasso", 1955) for the refectory of this Academy of Arts as
part of his B.A. A further mural followed within the
Hygienemusem (German Hygienic Museum) with the title
(„Lebensfreude“, which means "Joy of life") for his diploma.
Both paintings had been painted over for ideological reasons
after Richter escaped from East to West Germany (2 months before
the building of the Berlin wall); after unification of both
German states, the wall painting "Joy of life" (1956) was
uncovered in two places in the stairway of the German Hygienic
Museum, and after the millennium these two uncovered windows
with a look at the "Joy of Life" has been newly recovered. From
1957 to 1961 Richter worked as a master trainee on the academy
and took orders for the former state of the GDR. During this
time he worked intensively at murals ("Arbeiterkampf", which
means "Worker fight"), on paintings in oil (f.e. portraits of
the well known East-German actress "Angelica Domroese" and of
Richter's first wife "Ema"), on various self portraits and
furthermore on a panorama of Dresden with the neutral name
"Stadtbild" ("Townscape", 1956). Richter taught as a visiting
professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg and
the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and became tenured
professor in 1971 at Düsseldorf Art Academy. In 1983, Richter
resettled from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives
today. Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957. Nine years
later, she gave birth to his first daughter, Betty. He married
his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982. Richter had
his son, Moritz, with his third wife, Sabine Moritz, the year
they were married, 1995. One year later, his second daughter,
Ella Maria, was born.
Richter had his first solo show, Gerhard Richter, in 1964 at
Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Soon after, he had exhibitions in
Munich and Berlin and by the early 1970s exhibited frequently
throughout Europe and the United States. His fourth
retrospective, Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting, curated by
Robert Storr, opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art in
February 2002, then traveled to Chicago, San Francisco, and
Washington, DC. The Gerhard Richter Archive was established in
cooperation with the artist in 2005 as an institute of the State
Art Collections in Dresden, Germany. Richter has published a
number of catalogues, monographs, and books of his artwork and
notes on painting, and has been awarded many honors and prizes
for his art. He continues to make and exhibit paintings.
Although Richter gained popularity and critical praise
throughout his career, his fame burgeoned during his 2005
retrospective exhibition, which declared his place among the
most important artists of the 20th century. Today, many call
Gerhard Richter the best living painter. In part, this comes
from his ability to explore the medium at a time when many were
heralding its death. In 2005 Richter, in an interview by the
German political magazine Spiegel, urged the citizens of
Salzburg to "do something about" a sculpture by Markus Lüpertz,
and described the work as expressing the deprivation of public
art sponsorship in Germany. The sculpture, an homage to Mozart,
was promptly attacked by a right-wing art activist from Austria
and badly damaged.
Richter's work is full of tension between depicted reality and
the actuality of painting: process and material. From the 1950s
and his time in Eastern Germany's Dresden, the artist has been
known for his photo-paintings, particularly his landscapes, and
his involved abstract paintings. Despite the scope of this body
of work—which is commonly misunderstood as polar—Richter's
paintings consistently support a unified theme that is twofold.
Images (and ideas and ideals) are static, superficial,
unachievable and are to be doubted. Reality is a process of
imagination, material creation and revision. Richter’s subject
is the range of relationships between illusion and this reality,
his painting. Richter has stated that the use of photographic
imagery as a starting point for his early paintings resulted
from an attempt to escape the complicated process of deciding
what to paint, along with the critical and theoretical
implications accompanying such decisions within the context of a
modernist discourse. To achieve this, Richter began amassing
photos from magazines, books, etc, many of which became the
subject matter of his early photography-based paintings. Thus
the Atlas was born; a collection of thousands of photographs,
and cropped magazine and newspaper images, compiled in a single
volume.
Many of Richter's paintings are made in a multi-step process
of representations. He starts with a photograph, which he has
found or taken himself, and projects it onto his canvas, where
he traces it for exact form. Taking his color palette from the
photograph, he paints to replicate the look of the original
picture. His hallmark "blur"—sometimes a softening by the light
touch of a soft brush, sometimes a hard smear by an aggressive
pull with his squeegee—has two effects: 1. It offers the image a
photographic appearance; and 2. Paradoxically, it testifies the
painter's actions, both skilled and coarse, and the plastic
nature of the paint itself. In some paintings blurs and smudges
are severe enough to disrupt the image; it becomes hard to
understand or believe. The subject is nullified. In these
paintings, images and symbols (such as landscapes, portraits,
and news photos) are rendered fragile illusions, fleeting
conceptions in our constant reshaping of the world. In a 1988
series of fifteen ambiguous photo paintings entitled October 18,
1977 he depicted four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a
German left-wing terrorist organization. These paintings were
created from black-and-white newspaper and police photos. Three
RAF members were found dead in their prison cells on October 18,
1977, and the cause of their deaths was the focus of widespread
controversy. It is interesting to compare Richter's painting
with the early work of Vija Celmins with whom he shares some
similarities of subject and style.
In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of
nonrepresentational painting. The paintings evolve in stages,
based on his responses to the picture’s progress: the incidental
details and patterns that emerge. Throughout his process,
Richter uses the same techniques he uses in his representational
paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior
layers. Richter’s abstract work is remarkable for the illusion
of space that develops, ironically, out of his incidental
process: an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of
adding, moving, and subtracting paint. Despite unnatural
palettes, spaceless sheets of color, and obvious trails of the
artist’s tools, the abstract pictures often act like windows
through which we see the landscape outside. As in his
representational paintings, there is an equalization of illusion
and paint. In those paintings, he reduces worldly images to mere
incidents of Art. Similarly, in his abstract pictures, Richter
exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial
logic and believability. Nearly all of Richter’s work
demonstrates both illusionistic space that seems natural and the
physical activity and material of painting—as mutual
interferences. For Richter, reality is the combination of new
attempts to understand—to represent; in his case, to paint—the
world surrounding us. His 2004 book War Cut combines 216 closeup
photos of his 1987 painting No. 648-2 with the same number of
newspaper articles from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about
the beginning of the Iraq War.
In August 2007, Richter's stained glass in the Cologne
Cathedral was unveiled. It is an 113 square metre abstract
collage of 11,500 pixel-like squares in 72 colors, randomly
arranged by computer (with some symmetry), reminiscent of his
1974 painting "4096 colors". Richter designed the window for
free. Cardinal Joachim Meisner did not attend the window's
unveiling; he had preferred a figurative representation of 20th
century Christian martyrs and said that Richter's window would
fit better in a mosque or prayer house.
Throughout the body of Richter's work one can often observe
waves of minimalism appearing often to disappear again. It may
be noted that perhaps it may be necessary to view Richter as a
conceptual artist wherein his individual pieces point towards a
very painterly approach while possibly this may not be his
intent. If one views the progressions in the individual series
as single works a very different concept erupts. While many
critics agree that this analysis may be necessary, let us take
it one step further assuming that Richter's small series is
analogous to his entire body of work, one sees the same images
of realism to blur. For example Eight Grey 2002. It may be
considered thus his interest is in the progression, not the
individual images nor the qualities of paint nor any other
medium he uses. In this a new idea of minimalism is born, a
minimalism where the material means nothing however its use is
technically masterful. As was said by Jan Van Eyck in the
inscription on the frame of Man in the Red Turban "Als Ich Kann"
which are the first words of the proverb "As I can, but not as I
would."
In 1976, Richter first gave the title Abstract Painting to
one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few
words to name and explain it, he felt he was “letting a thing
come, rather than creating it.”
