01.06.2012
GERHART RICHTER
A visit to his exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.
I was fascinated by his early work based on black and white photos. When you get up close , his technique is incredible and the effect is amazing.
The grayness of Gerhard Richter's work is instructive, and distressing. It comes, of course, from black and white photography, from snapshots, newspaper pictures, portraits. In any of these forms, precisely because they purport to be records of reality, photographs are actually furthest from reality. The moments are not false but the records are falsifications that inherently disregard what came before and what came after. They are, in other words, or can be, works of art.
Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, where he lived through the rise of Hitler, the war, and the installation of Communism in East Germany. He studied art there, was successful in a kind of modernist Socialist Realist style of painting, and then left in 1961 for West Germany (Düsseldorf), where he remains (near Cologne). Most of his work in the 1960s is photographically based. He had been a photographer's assistant as a youth and now made scrapbooks of photos, some of which he projected and rendered into paintings. Most are of families, vacation scenes, fashion shots, but occasionally a newspaper photo intrudes of American planes bombing or of emaciated naked dead bodies attended by vultures. The references to tragedy in his paintings are sideways, often personal, sometimes private.
Richter enters a spiritualized realm in the 1970s, a realm of abstraction, revered art of the past, mysterious and familiar landscapes, and eventually, in the 1990s and beyond, of maternity, paternity, and self-portraiture. Gray seems still to be behind everything, but color becomes more prevalent. He literally introduces many of the possibilities of color with a very neat and large color chart of 1974 called 256 Colors. In the 1980s and '90s, his abstractions are increasingly formulaic, made with a squeegee that pushes across the surface in straight paths the way his brush did in "unpainting" images during the 1960s. They constantly reveal new accidents of color and shape but also cover up and hide.