Gerhard Richter
Abstraktes Bild (fig.1) represents a crescendo in Richter’s career where the artist reached new grounds in his own investigation of technique and practice. Paradoxically his abstract works become an exponent for the relevance of painting in the 20th Century, while at the same time, questioning its very authenticity (Sotherby’s, 2018). The leitmotif of his thoughts are a miscellany of dialectical binaries; These junctures and the interplays they conduce, make up the experiential quality of viewing his work; in which the act of viewing itself is all part of the affair. His work is produced at the point of contradiction which it endlessly and systematically mediates; a dialectical mediation between proximity and distance (Osbourne, 1992).
In this short piece it would be impossible to expound on the variety of technique and direction his practice has taken throughout his career, so I will look at a selection of work that highlights many of the reoccurring ideas his work presents.
Fig.1
Abstraktes Bild 636
1987
Oil on canvas
2 parts, 260cm x 400cm
Blurred Lines
Blurring be it, literally or metaphorically, have become Richter’s trademark. The act of painting over a photo corrupts its clarity and turns a transparent lens into an opaque one. In Richter’s work it raises a disquisition on the notion of technological synthetic reproduction and an ethereal characteristic, but also the surfaces through which we view the world and the vectors on which we relay and broadcast information (McCarthy 2011).
As the artist expounds, “When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style,” (Richter, 2009).
He exposes the false autonomy and supposed objectivity ascribed to photography and challenges his audience to question and re-evaluate their own perception of contemporary media.” (Sotherby’s, 2013).
In a series of Seascapes (fig3), produced across his entire career, the works follow suit in their total reduction to a technological “blurred” state. Here the horizon acts as the dividing line between two photographs, inverted, repositioned or collaged in such a way to remove them from any sense of original intention and create an image of perfection.
“When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style,”
Fig.2
Domplatz, Mailand
1968
Oil on canvas
275 cm x 290 cm
Fig.2a
Domplatz, Mailand
1968 Oil on canvas insitu at Sotherby's.
Fig.2b
Original postcard depicting Piazza Duomo Milan.
Fig.3 (below)
Seestücke (Foto-Collagen)
1969
Photo Collage
51.7cm x 66.7xcm
Richters’ re-presentation and distortion comprise a discerning social critique of present-day modes of visual communication. “I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsman like but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit.” (Richter, 1995).
Even fragmented the notion of the Romantic is maintained but mediated through the act of looking, and in so doing conducts a dialogue with Romanticism. The fascination that, that endows in Germany, particularly in the work of artists like Caspar David Friedrich are here reduced to a critical inquisition. “…voided of sublimity, wedded instead to repetition, reproduction and interrogation of the act of looking and the technology through which the act takes place (McCarthy, 2011).
This is what sets Richter apart. He has avoided the trap of uncritically reiterating a fetishized version of Romanticism by reducing it to ethereal component parts, and therefore engaging in a critical manner (McCarthy, 2011).
Much of what Richter’s intentions are, can be found in explanations by the artist himself; but is often lost to verbose critical theory. The over-riding essence that binds his work is its consistency to address the problem of the continuing possibility of painting as a historically significant activity (Osborne, 1992).
Painting after photography has not been the same as painting before; indeed, photography has often cited the death of painting. Yet Richter’s response is to return to the source of this crisis and use painting as a means for photography, for the interrogation of photography and thus image making, as a cultural form (Osbourne, 1992).
Osbourne continues to posit on the philosophical question of the theory of double negation by considering painting by photography and photography by painting. He recounts on three versions of double negation theory: One of mathematics and calculus, in which the second action cancels out the first. One as predicated by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; where dialectical thinking derives its dynamic of negations from its ability to reveal contradictions.
And a third, favored, definition put forward by German philosopher Theodore Adorno, “what is negated,” Adorno writes, “is negated until it has passed”. Richter’s paintings are negatives, negatives of paintings and negatives of photographs (Osbourne, 1992). In earnest no one component is more important than the other.
Richter’s work takes on extra pertinence when we consider how much image making; phone- cameras, Photoshop, Instagram, etc has evolved as a medium alongside the proliferation of technology. Today images also exist in a virtual world, constructed of its own binary language, and our perception is distanced furthermore.
The artist’s work has been described as the source code for modern living. His mode of engendering mediation through our perceptual relation to the world by re-routing it through its glitch ridden mediating screens are ever relevant (McCarthy, 2011).
Technique
Richter’s use of a large-scale spatula or squeegee is a technique that depends on the aleatory nature of chance, yet his paintings reverberate not only with the verve of natural phenomenon and hermeneutics; placing Richter into a legacy of great landscape painters. But, also resonate a phenomenological virtue (Sotherby’s 2018).
Richter’s uses a variety of technique across a wide range of media. Here he uses a large-scale spatula or squeegee, a technique that depends on the aleatory nature of chance. It is not only used to apply vast swathes of colour across the canvas but also, to scrape away, to reveal and to add layers.
My Attempt
Keyword:
Ethereal adjective
1. Extremely delicate and light in a way that seems not to be of this world: An ethereal world created through poetic imagination. Ethereal beauty.
2. Heavenly or celestial: gone to his ethereal home.
3. Of or relating to the upper regions of space.
4. Chemistry. pertaining to, containing, or resembling ethyl
Note also: Ether. Ethernet. Out there in the ether.
References and links
VIDEO
Sotherby's - Man Without A Brush
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Zbpz1Rjjw
Gerhard Richter Painting: watch the master artist at work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF6EluMNR14
TEXTS
McCarthy, T. (2011). Blurred visionary: Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/sep/22/gerhard-richter-tate-retrospective-panorama [Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].• Sotherby’s, New York. (2018). Contemporary Art Evening Auction. [online] Sotherby’s. Available at: https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2018/contemporary-art-evening-sale-n09932/lot.8.html [Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].• Sotherby’s, New York. (2013). Contemporary Art Evening Auction. [online] Sotherby’s New York. Available at: https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2013/may-2013-contemporary-evening-n08991/lot.20.html [Accessed 29 Aug. 2019].• Osborne, Peter (1992). “Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter’s Negatives.” October, vol. 62, 1992, pp. 103–113. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/778704.• Storr, Robert (2002). “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting.” Exh. Cat. New York, The Museum Of Modern Art. New York 2002.• Richter, Gerhard (2009). “The Artist in Gerhard Richter: Text, Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961 – 2007.” London 2009.