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Mar 9, 2020 · In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments.
- Peter Schjeldahl
Richter had intended the work to be understood in an art-historical context, but in Germany the topicality of the work was difficult to ignore. “Here [in Germany] one was so affected by the subject matter that the paintings were almost exclusively viewed in political terms,” Richter reflected.
So why still paint? Well, Richter might say, because painting provides a freedom to investigate our relationships to images and to challenge how we see and make sense of the world around us. And those are just two reasons—each of Richter’s paintings offers answers to this question.
In 1971 Richter made a painting from a photograph, with an illusionistic appearance, in shades of yellow, beige, and brown. In response, Blinky Palermo made a monochromatic, anti-illusionistic companion piece by mixing Richter’s different color shades into one color.
- Coosje Van Bruggen
- Summary of Gerhard Richter
- Accomplishments
- Biography of Gerhard Richter
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. 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 obje...
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 truthful...Richter borrows much of his painted imagery from newspapers, or even his own family albums. Often he begins by mechanically projecting such an image onto the canvas, a technique for thinking about...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 c...In Richter's completely abstract canvases, personal emotion and all traces of the painter's autobiography seem missing. The painting's many layers, strokes, and scrapes of color may thus appear as...Childhood
Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, during the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or the Nazi Third Reich. Notably, some of Richter's relatives were directly involved in the Nazi movement, namely his father, a schoolteacher, and an uncle. Richter's mother, the daughter of a concert pianist, encouraged her son's early talent for draftsmanship. In 1948, at the age of 16, Richter quit his formal education and took up an apprenticeship as a set painter for the...
Early Training
Beginning in 1951, Richter studied at the Kunstakademie, Dresden, where he painted murals and political banners commissioned by state-owned businesses. During this time, the East German communist regime imposed a Social Realist style on all practicing artists; this policy effectively turned art to the service of political propaganda. In keeping with this development, the government banned exhibitions of American Pop art and Fluxus. These circumstances severely limited Richter's fledgling arti...
Mature Period
While continuing to paint in a realist manner, around 1961, Richter began using photographs, projecting and tracing images directly onto the canvas. Richter believed that he was, as an artist, "not painting a particular person, but a picture that has nothing in common with the model." Thus while he painted individuals from photographs, Richter's replica images were often blurred and bore nothing distinctively identifiable about the subject, an effect that forced the viewer to consider the fun...
- German
- February 9, 1932
- Dresden, Germany
Nov 4, 2011 · In 2011, Tate Modern had a major retrospective of the work of German painter Gerhard Richter. Exhibition curator Mark Godfrey asked Tate paintings conservator about the artist's extraordinary technique.
Richter has described the difference between photography and painting by saying that the former provokes horror and the latter grief. Richter has deliberately avoided being identified too closely with any personal style and has also made abstract paintings.
