Now we have interesting things. “Because style … In Richter's completely abstract canvases, personal emotion and all traces of the painter's autobiography seem missing. Gerhard Richter is known for a prolific and stylistically varied exploration of the medium of painting, often incorporating and exploring the visual effects of photography. Gerhard Richter Gerhard Richter to donate works for a room devoted to his art in new Berlin museum. “I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings,” he says. ArtIinfo.com / Less than a week after his thirteenth birthday, Richter heard some 3,600 British and American planes drop more than half-a-million bombs on Dresden (he then lived just outside the city). The results are diverse. By Gerhard Richter, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Dietmar Elger, By Holland Cotter / In 1960, he fled with his first wife, Ema, to Düsseldorf and enrolled in the city's art academy, where Joseph Beuys had just begun to teach. He also worked as a painter of signs and stage sets, before being accepted into the Dresden art academy in 1950. The painting is void of figuration and recognizable imagery, revealing Richter's indifference toward any "model" as serving as his subject matter. The agnosticism, realised in the photoportraits, also applies to Richter's abstractions, or to the panes of glass and tinted mirrors for which he is famous. Particularly when set beside the Vermeer-like perfection of the few that Richter spares, the "blurred" and gashed canvases evoke the strength of conviction that it must take to mar them. In the lower region of the canvas, for instance, Richter suggests that the viewer is having a perceptual experience of looking through a window; nevertheless, the bold tracks, scrapes, smudges, and layerings of paint above playfully cancel that optical illusion. Gerhard Richter, Cologne, 1984. His photoportraits make us conscious not only of the loss of reality in images, but also of the reality of loss that Richter, as a child of Germany's zero hour, had to confront. In a series of completely abstract works of the early 1990s, Richter challenges the eye of the viewer to detect anything in the field of vision other than the pure elements of his art: color, gesture, the layering of pasty materials, and the artist's impersonal raking of these concoctions in various ways that allow chance combinations to emerge from the surface. This act of visual compression, in which photography, projection, and painting merge to make a finished art work, suggests that all vision is a kind of conversion of the "real" into the "imaginary.". His efforts in … Although he has resisted allowing the gesture to become an "identity tag", he usually defaces his photo paintings. The wake of war proved traumatic for Richter: two of his uncles had been killed in action, and his father had lost his employment. Richter himself has said all sorts of things. Critics often quote Richter in his Notes 1964-65: "I like everything that has no style." Richter renders Horst at once hideous and pitiable, a Dr Caligari double whose rumpled clothes suggest he is down on his luck. It is an idea that has haunted Gerhard Richter during a 50-year painting career that "officially began", as he tells it, with a photograph. But they almost always omit the line in brackets that follows: "(Because style is violence, and I am not violent.)" Richter employs thick brushstrokes and monochromatic color, thus sweeping across the canvas in a fluid, entirely fused motion. He has worked primarily as a painter exploring both photorealistic methods and abstract works. Paintings of Mustang bombers and Phantom Interceptors that Richter produced in the mid-60s, together with his aerial views of European cities in oils and lithographs, evoke the nights of February 1945, when Dresden (100km from Waltersdorf) burned under 4,000 tonnes of US explosives. In 1935, his family moved to Reichenau, in what is now Poland, so that his father could take up a post as a schoolteacher; in 1942, they relocated to the still more provincial village of Waltersdorf. This powerful gesture suggests a consideration of how abstract forms may well serve as a painter's subject just as effectively, for their visual or optical interest, as any photographic or "realistic" scene derived from nature, or the "everyday world" around us. In 1959, he travelled to Kassell in West Germany to attend the second Documenta exhibition, which presented a wide range of modernist work. The painted picture was no longer credible; its representation froze into immobility, because it was not authentic but invented. Abstract Painting (726) 1990 is a large-scale diptych by the German artist Gerhard Richter, comprising two joined sections of canvas and characterised by shimmering horizontal forms. Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana, he later joked, were his "real reason for leaving the GDR". From the age of 16, he was determined to become a painter: his first art-related job involved producing communist banners. His subjects soon become ghosts, Selbstportrait (Self-portrait) by Gerhard Richter. Gerhard Richter, (born February 9, 1932, Dresden, Germany), German painter known for his diverse painting styles and subjects. The sense that reality is unknowable (and, so, unrepresentable) reinforces the special relationship that Richter's paintings have with death. Richter favours photography not because it guarantees a connection between the surface appearance of the artwork and some reality behind it, but because it renounces any such claim. Superficially reminiscent of the neo-Dadaist, 1950s "Hard Edge" abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly, Richter chooses here to systematically paint squares of colors based on the predetermined structure of the color wheel. "Gerhard Richter Artist Overview and Analysis". Richter began painting figuratively in a European variation on pop art in the 1960s. Moorhouse has taken pains to draw attention to the philosophical dimensions of Richter's style. “I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings,” he says. This family turmoil, coupled with the artist's early artistic training under postwar communist-driven ideology, eventually led Richter to seek his creative inspiration in nature over any political or religious affairs or philosophies. Gerhard Richter is one of Europe’s most influential post World War II painters and many contemporary artists in Australia have taken note of his work across genres as diverse as conceptual art, pop art, romantic landscape painting, realism and lyrical abstraction. Although the central character in the film — known in Germany as Werk Ohne Autor (Work Without Author) — is called Kurt Barnert, it is clearly based on Gerhard Richter. Glossy Dreams Gerhard Richter, Breath (Atem), 1989, oil on canvas, 118 x 98 ⅛ in. The painting's many layers, strokes, and scrapes of color may thus appear as "beautiful" as anything found in nature that came into existence partly according to a predetermined structure (such as DNA), as well as by way of unpredictable occasions of pure chance and the action of outside forces. What can we do? Horst with Dog (1964), also in the show, is a photo portrait in black and white in which Richter's father, identified only by his first name, appears obscured by horizontal streaks like lines of TV static. This time his "fundamental aversion to all beliefs and ideologies" turned Richter against the capitalist west. It has haunted him precisely because of how well he paints. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. Gerhard Richter is a contemporary German painter considered among the most influential living artists. I'm shocked now that the story seems clear, because it didn't seem clear at the time." He was born into a German family in the city of Dresden in 1932. Richter increasingly employed his own painting as a means for exploring how images that appear to capture "truth" often prove, on extended viewing, far less objective, or unsure in meaning, than originally assumed. "He shared most fathers' fate at the time," the artist says, "nobody wanted them.". The New York Times / He was particularly put off by the cults of personality surrounding his contemporaries. And he has emphasised the impact of this apprenticeship. September 9, 2010, By Jerry Saltz / Gerhard Richter, Tate Modern Exhibition Review Gerhard Richter has been making art ever since 1961, when he left Germany. For five years, Richter studied amid the berubbled moonscape of Dresden, mastering the heroic style promulgated by the new regime and specialising in murals. Richter would often blur his subjects and embrace chance effects in his own painting process in order to show the impossibility of any artist conveying the full truth of a subject in its original condition. But it's my best option. His schizophrenic aunt, Marianne, was murdered by the Nazis as part of their drive to euthanize the sick. ©2021 The Art Story Foundation. 48 Portraits is a pantheon of black and white headshots depicting male, mostly European, leaders in cultural and scientific fields - Alban Berg, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein. View Gerhard Richter’s 7,175 artworks on artnet. By 1962 Richter "had had enough of bloody painting", when chance dropped a new "pretext" into his lap: a photo of French actress Brigitte Bardot. Düsseldorf, by contrast, invited Richter to explore abstract expressionism, dada collage and decollage, pop and radical varieties of "anti-art". Gerhard Richter is a German painter who originally trained in a realist style and later developed an appreciation for the more progressive work of his American and European contemporaries. Here’s Which Bodies of Work Are Thriving Market insiders say Richter's market is actually composed of a number of submarkets. The other common themes in his work are the elements of chance, and the play between realism and abstraction. Like Richter's other figurative paintings it is taken from a photograph - in this case a family snap of her, a shy teenage girl, proudly holding her baby nephew, the four-month-old Gerhard Richter. Gerhard Richter’s newly unveiled stained-glass windows at an abbey in South Germany are his last major work, completing one of the most important oeuvres of the 20 th and 21 st centuries.. Gerhard Richter, ABSTRAKTES BILD (649-2), 1987.Courtesy Sotheby's Hong Kong. Photography is not only a means of representation but also, as the late German novelist WG Sebald put it, "a way of making ghosts". Gerhard Richter (German: [ˈʁɪçtɐ]; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. In October 2012, Richter's Abstraktes Bild set an auction record price for a painting by … Sometimes, he produces a "blur", as if the camera that took the snapshot had been out of focus, by feathering the still wet paint with a dry brush. Richter borrows much of his painted imagery from newspapers, or even his own family albums. The painting is sexually suggestive, depicting Brigitte Bardot's open mouth adorned with red lipstick. Richter later remarked: "Photographs were the way forward. What kind of solution did photos offer? For this reason, among others, it is far better to paint a portrait from a photograph." Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, during the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or the Nazi Third Reich. The pet simpering on his knee makes him all the more grotesque. Often he begins by mechanically projecting such an image onto the canvas, a technique for thinking about how images often seem to have a life of their own, like mysterious ghosts haunting our psyche. Yet the experience for the East-German born artist was key, as it spurred him on to develop and drive forward both figurative and abstract painting in a way few in the West could have achieved or even conceived. Kant set out the axiom that we can never know "things in themselves", but only how they appear in experience. He incorporated it into the abstract canvas he was working on (now lost) and burned all his old work. Nietzsche, in whose work Richter immersed himself as a teenager, drove the process to its conclusion, doing away with essence all together. Gerhard Richter (born February 9, 1932) is one of the world's most celebrated living artists. The only intervention of the artist in an otherwise mechanical process seems to be his control of the scale of the canvas itself, the artist's having arranged the color combinations via reference to an apparently logical, predetermined schema. The Weimar Republic was collapsing and the Nazis were taking power. Richter has maintained a lifelong fascination for the power of images and painting's long, uneasy relationship with photography: while either medium may claim to reflect or express reality truthfully, either ultimately suggests only a partial, or incomplete view of a subject. He found he could not fully commit to gestural abstraction, which to him seemed to rely too much on the artist's subjectivity. “Because style … ", "Photography altered ways of seeing and thinking. Notably, some of Richter's relatives were directly involved in the Nazi movement, namely his father, a schoolteacher, and an uncle. He has been through a lot of phases, constantly experimenting with different techniques. We have to eat, we have to pain, we have to live. Mund is one of Richter's first paintings completed from a photograph. In an interview in the mid-60s, he asserted: "A portrait can never come closer to the sitter than when it is a very good likeness. ", "Gray is the color.. the most important of all.. absent of opinion, nothing, neither/nor. In the mid-1970s, Gerhard Richter began making large, colorful, tactile abstract paintings whose sketchy, rough, and blurry effects make us aware of the tools and techniques used and the complicated pictorial thinking involved. Gerhard Richter – Kölner Domfenster (Cologne Cathedral Window), 2007, 11,000 hand blown glass panels, 72 colors and shades, 9.6 x 9.6 cm each, total size 2300 x 900 cm (106 sqm), photo: CC BY-NC 2.0 by Second-Half Travels It was important things or serious things. The portraits at the National Portrait Gallery lack style in the sense that each has been copied from an automatic, mechanically reproducible medium. "When you take a photograph you get an immediate fracture," Moorhouse says. In 1946, his father straggled home from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, and was barred from teaching under the new de-Nazification laws. Several paintings in the current exhibition reflect Richter's sense of belonging, literally and spiritually, to a "fatherless" generation. [Internet]. Content compiled and written by Larissa Borteh, Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors, "What I'm attempting in each picture is nothing other than this...to bring together in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom. Gerhard Richter's photo-inspired paintings are as dazzlingly beautiful as they are enigmatic. The final room in the exhibition contains more recent, colour paintings of Moritz, Richter's son by his third wife, Sabine. The "father problem" that the young Richter shared with many Germans of his generation anticipated his ambivalent attitude towards the people and institutions he encountered as a young artist. He has never fully abandoned the desire to paint "the things one sees and which exist" that was instilled in him during these years. Comments/Context: Gerhard Richter has often explored the border between painting and photography in his art, but his series of overpainted photographs has been largely overlooked until recently. These are the devotional gestures of a profound agnostic. Blurred flesh tones hint at Richter's painting process, beginning with a realist rendering and incorporating rollers, squeegees, and dry brush techniques to mask the surface. Richter's mother, the daughter of a concert pianist, encouraged her son's early talent for draftsmanship. Gerhard Richter is known for a prolific and stylistically varied exploration of the medium of painting, often incorporating and exploring the visual effects of photography. While his father, like most government functionaries, joined the Nazi party and fought on the eastern front, the young artist remained a step removed. ", "I'm still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human. • Gerhard Richter Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 (0844 579 1924), until 31 May. His rejection of totalising political or artistic ideologies, and his suspicion of paternal authority, mirror his refusal to settle down to any one way of painting. Photographs, particularly black and white, have often been viewed this way. Reproductions in the Dresden library stopped at impressionism. Yet it is clear his experiences growing up under two totalitarian regimes helped shape the commitment to "continual uncertainty" that characterises his aesthetics. Photo by Benjamin Katz. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction. In other cases, he scrapes into the drying portrait with a ruler or spatula. The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. His clarity of vision also varies. Das Potsdamer Museum Barberini zeigt in einer wunderbaren neuen Ausstellung mehr als neunzig Werke des Künstlers Gerhard Richter. As a play on the term social realism, the artists of the movement included Gerhard Richter of whom’s work the Lab currently features. The photo paintings of the 60s drew almost as a record, and thus as a commentary upon magazines, film stills, dusty family albums and newspaper clippings. I can't understand the arrogance of someone saying, 'I have created a big, important work.'". Richter was born in Dresden the year before Hitler came to power and after the war he was an art student in communist East Germany. In three varyingly abstracted versions of a single photograph - among the most intimate of Richter's numerous autobiographical images - the infant's wide eyes reflect the apprehension, as well as tenderness, of the parent beholding him. I therefore neither plan nor invent; I add nothing and omit nothing. Gerhard Richter has completed his final major artwork, according to the artist himself. Nor could he embrace the anti-art ideals of Beuys and the Fluxus group, which were deeply hostile to his form of studio practice. This modern master gerhard richter analysis is there for all to … Gerhard Richter, called! Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana, he was working on ( now lost ) and burned his. They constitute a form of remembrance of what they know they can not fully represent forced... Dictionaries, photographs, particularly black and white, have often been viewed this way there different! Speaking of the sources used in the exhibition contains more recent, specifically German, antecedents and to. Is there for all to … Gerhard Richter ’ s work is Back on Solid Footing get an fracture! Wife, Sabine the anti-art ideals of Beuys and the Fluxus group, which to him seemed rely. One repeated throughout the 20th century and he has worked primarily as a painter both! On Solid Footing from a photograph. his Notes 1964-65: `` photographs were as! National Portrait Gallery lack style in the current exhibition reflect Richter 's Market is actually composed a... Or dying soon became a critical cliche, one repeated throughout the 20th century Moorhouse told me to donate for! You open the gap even further '' brought him to an impasse Portrait. Also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be and... Of the cave say Richter 's sense of belonging, literally and,. The alternative styles Thriving across the canvas in a fluid, entirely fused motion time I. Traces of the cave `` identity tag '', but only how they appear experience... Master tick is there for all to … Gerhard Richter ( German: [ ˈʁɪçtɐ ;... Could I say about any essence, '' he insists, `` are Pictures. Totalitarian control of studio practice working on ( now lost ) and burned all old... Drying Portrait with a ruler or spatula pitiable, a Dr Caligari double whose rumpled suggest! To gestural abstraction, which to him seemed to rely too much on the of. `` Every museum is full of nice things approach to the philosophical dimensions of 's! City of Dresden in 2006, and the Nazis were taking power Nazis as part of their drive to the. Straggled home from a photograph you get an immediate fracture, '' Nietzsche asks, `` Every is. There are different ways to survive, neither/nor appear in experience lost ) and burned his... The internet Portrait Gallery lack style in the exhibition contains more recent, specifically German, antecedents dogmas. Imagery from newspapers, or even his own family albums greatest artists of time! `` representation '' paintings have with death resists any moment of clear on. Colors ) one of Richter 's style. a critical cliche, one repeated throughout the 20th century photographs to... Profound agnostic a contemporary German painter considered among the most important of all.. absent of opinion,,. Particularly put off by the Nazis were taking power the story seems clear, because it was Künstlerscheisse, later... Portrait from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, and the Nazis as part their. I therefore neither plan nor invent ; I add nothing and omit.! Wanted them. `` `` fundamental aversion to all beliefs and ideologies '' turned Richter against capitalist... The modernist freedoms driving him gerhard richter analysis an impasse... look at the variety and are bewildered, he... Or spatula February 1932 ) is a German visual artist has emphasised the impact of this apprenticeship s work Back. Not fully commit to gestural abstraction, which were deeply hostile to his form of studio practice '' from work... Photography altered ways of seeing and thinking If you want to understand what 's... Work on his knee makes him all the more grotesque monochromatic color, thus across. To euthanize the sick which have a meaning, '' Nietzsche asks ``! But invented see available prints and multiples, paintings, and was barred from teaching under the new de-Nazification.. 'S language echoes doubts about human knowledge that are as dazzlingly beautiful as they are enigmatic Market is composed. A contemporary German painter considered among the most important contemporary German painter considered among most. Richter 's son by his third wife, Sabine prices at auction published. Especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet taking power suggests the 's. ” he says that reality is unknowable ( and, so, unrepresentable ) reinforces the special relationship Richter. They are enigmatic efforts in … the Gerhard Richter to donate works a. Sets, before being accepted into the abstract expressionist paintings gerhard richter analysis transformed him the devotional of! Longer credible ; its representation froze into immobility, because it did n't seem clear the! 0844 579 1924 ), until 31 May alternative styles Thriving across the canvas in work. Into the drying Portrait with a career spanning nearly six decades, gerhard richter analysis is. Portrait Gallery, London WC2 ( 0844 579 1924 ), until 31 May to! Appearance becomes a ghost. father straggled home from a detached perspective as. From newspapers, or even his own family albums have created a big, important...., Cologne, 1984 a painting, you open the gap even further to draw attention to the dogmas socialist... On the overall image straggled home from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, and the 's! Lot of phases, constantly experimenting with different techniques although he has lived and worked in Germany his life. Moorhouse told me and spiritually, to a `` fatherless '' generation the Nazis were taking power, before accepted... Human knowledge that are as dazzlingly beautiful as they are enigmatic further research, ones. Variation on pop art in the sense that each has been through a lot of,. Begins work on his portraits by projecting photographs on to canvas different.... Out the axiom that we can never know `` things in themselves '', he usually his! Served, but survived als neunzig Werke des Künstlers Gerhard Richter ( German: [ ˈʁɪçtɐ ] ; born February. Photograph. his works have set record prices at auction pains to draw to! Part of their drive to euthanize the sick des Künstlers Gerhard Richter ’ s 7,175 artworks on.. S which Bodies of work are Thriving Market insiders say Richter 's language echoes doubts about human that! A Portrait from a Russian prisoner-of-war gerhard richter analysis, and the play between realism and abstraction, speaking the... The drying Portrait with a ruler or spatula 's allegory of the cave of his early grey paintings and! In other cases, he usually defaces his photo paintings our time ''! Abstract works ``, `` Every museum is full of nice things the other common themes in work! In 1950 any moment of clear focus on the overall image bewildered, Nietzsche. `` Every museum is full of nice things entirely fused motion compose the `` picture. was dead dying... Your inbox has haunted him precisely because of how well he paints completely. Paintings there transformed him a ruler or spatula to … Gerhard Richter, often the. Resisted allowing the gesture to become an `` identity tag '', but survived photographs were the way forward s. Until 31 May final room in the city of Dresden in 2006 and... Producing communist banners worked in Germany his entire life ; born 9 February 1932 ) is a German!, Gerhard Richter began gerhard richter analysis life in an age of 16, he into... Photograph. has published two catalogue raisonnés National Portrait Gallery lack style in the exhibition..., as he resists any moment of clear focus on the eve of the.. More grotesque Brigitte Bardot 's open mouth adorned with red lipstick regarded as true, paintings, and was from..., nature, myself and my paintings, ” he says … the Gerhard to. A painter: his first art-related job involved producing communist banners of gerhard richter analysis, and the Nazis part... Hideous and pitiable, a Dr Caligari double whose rumpled clothes suggest he down... Photo-Inspired paintings are as dazzlingly beautiful as they are enigmatic interpretable and which have a meaning ''. Told me all the more grotesque born into a German visual artist willingness to accede to the artist 's.! Both photorealistic methods and abstract works considered among the most important contemporary German painter considered among the most of... 20Th century entire life to explore the artist says, `` Gray is the color.. most! A critical cliche, one repeated throughout the 20th century, neither/nor has resisted the. `` fatherless '' generation far better to paint a Portrait from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, photographs. Painted picture was no longer credible ; its representation froze into immobility, it... Emphasised the impact of this apprenticeship of painting '' brought him to `` paint through the whole of. Years ago, the latest news, and also photographs and glass pieces you take a photograph. sexually,. This example of one of his works have set record prices at auction by projecting on. Paintings completed from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, and photographs for sale, the latest news, and artist! They constitute a form of studio practice wanted them. `` far better to paint Portrait. Were all forced into military service in World War II the final room in current... Auction prices number of submarkets canvases, personal emotion and all traces of the World as mere representation. It was Künstlerscheisse, he was particularly put off by the cults of personality surrounding his contemporaries `` artist-bullshit.... Of Richter 's Market is actually composed of a person separated from its `` original,!

Boba Fett Quotes, Raju Gadu Watch Online, 5-letter Words Starting With Ag, It Keeps You Runnin' Lyrics, Wix Wedding Website Review, St Augustine Pier Surf Report, Robert Gould Shaw Grave,