Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter, artist and art
Impressions: Clean and clear works, empty faces, melancholy of fading memories and passing emotions, holiday snaps, newspaper cuttings, weight of meanings, contemplation, history, ideology, war, beauty in terror, conceptualism, irony, scepticism, nostalgia, self-reproduction, postmodern, photorealism and abstraction, near monochrome, gray, after abstract-expressionism, uniform, strategy…
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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.
Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours
Composed of bright monochrome squares randomly arranged in a grid to create stunning sheets of kaleidoscopic color, Gerhard Richter’s 4900 Colors (2007)—the latest result of the artist’s long-term exploration of seriality—was created just following the completion of his design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, unveiled in August 2007, which is made of 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass in 72 colors. amazon.com
Style and technique Richter is working in, art movement, art prizes, major exhibitions:
Der Kaiserring Painting Photography Pop Art Praemium Imperiale Award Documenta Kassel Venice Biennale
Gerhard Richter art books amazon
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artist and art © the-artists.org 1998 - 2010
Gerhard Richter and the Disappearrance of the Image. Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
Gerhard Richter has devoted his entire artistic career to the search for what we might call the essence of image, where the image is no longer a representation of reality but the creation of a reality in its own right. Reflecting on the value of images in today’s world, he cites contemporary visual repertoire, such as media images, but at the same time he also uses private photographs or genre subjects and themes as the foundation material for his reflection on painting.
Familie Schmidt (1964) and Porträt Liz Kertelge (1966) are examples of the so-called Fotobilder (‘photographic paintings’) that he produced by reworking photographic models projected by an episcope onto a white ground in paint: one, a normal family album snap with a mother, a father and their children sitting on the sofa at home; the other, the portrait of a movie star. Through a process involving the transformation of painting, the original photographic images lose their objectivity, acquiring a blurred effect that highlights not so much the content but the value of the image per se, producing a kind of translation from one medium to another. In Volker Bradke (1966), on the other hand, the blurrred effect is achieved directly through the use of a video, the only video the artist has ever produced, portraying one of Richter’s friends who was a leading light in Düsseldorf cultural life in the sixties. Richter highlights the difference between the subjective experience of reality and its real objectivity. The image may be an object but it is not objective; it develops on the level of perception and of its nuances.