Gerhard Richter

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Gerhard Richter

Born February 9, 1932
Dresden,Germany
Nationality German
Field Painting
Training Dresden Art Academy, Dresden
Famous works Eight Grey, 2002

Gerhard Richter (born February 9, 1932 in Dresden) is a prominent German artist. Richter is considered by some critics as one of the most important German artists of the post-World War II period and is also one of the world's most expensive, with his paintings often selling for several million dollars apiece.

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden,Germany and grew up in the former Reichenau (today Bogatynia in Poland) and in Waltersdorf in the Upper Lusatia countryside. He left school after tenth grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Art Academy. In 1948 he terminated the higher professional school in Zittau, and was trained there betwenn 1949 and 1951 to the writing as well as stage and advertising painter. In 1950 his application for membership in the Dresden Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (Dresden University of Visual Arts, founded in 1764) was rejected. He could finally begin his study at the Dresden Academy of Arts in 1951. His teachers were Karl von Appen, Ulrich Lohmar and Will Grohmann. In these early days of his artwork he prepared a wall painting ("Communion with Picasso", 1955) for the refectory of this Academy of Arts as part of his B.A. A further mural followed within the Hygienemusem (German Hygienic Museum) with the title („Lebensfreude“, which means "Joy of life") for his diploma. Both paintings had been painted over for ideological reasons after Richter escaped from East to West-Germany (two years before the building of the Berlin wall); after unification of the both German states the wall painting "Joy of life" (1956) has been uncovered at two places in the stairway of the German Hygienic Museum, and after the millennium these two uncovered windows with a look at the "Joy of Life" has been newly recovered. From 1957 to 1961 Richter worked as a master trainee on the academy and took orders for the former state of the GDR. In this time he worked intensively at murals ("Arbeiterkampf", which means "Worker fight"), on paintings in oil (f.e. portraits of the well known East-German actress "Angelica Domroese" and of Richter's first wife "Ema"), on various selfportraits and furthermore on a panorama of Dresden with the neutral name "Stadtbild" ("Townscape", 1956).

Richter taught as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and became tenured professor in 1971 at Düsseldorf Art Academy. In 1983, Richter resettled from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where he lives till this time.

Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957. Nine years later, she gave birth to his first daughter, Betty. He married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982. Richter had his son, Moritz, with his third wife, Sabine Moritz, the year they were married, 1995. One year later, his second daughter, Ella Maria, was born.

Richter had his first solo show, Gerhard Richter, in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Soon after, he had exhibitions in Munich and Berlin and by the early 1970s exhibited frequently throughout Europe and the United States. His fourth retrospective, Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting, curated by Robert Storr, opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art in February 2002, then traveled to Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

The Gerhard Richter Archive was established in cooperation with the artist in 2005 as an institute of the State Art Collections in Dresden, Germany (www.gerhard-richter-archiv.de).

Richter has published a number of catalogues, monographs, and books of his artwork and notes on painting, and has been awarded many honors and prizes for his art. He continues to make and exhibit paintings.

Although Richter gained popularity and critical praise throughout his career, his fame burgeoned during his most recent retrospective exhibition, which declared his place among the most important artists of the 20th century. Today, many call Gerhard Richter the best living painter. In part this comes from his ability to explode the medium at a time when many were heralding its death.

Many of his works can be found at [1].

Unfortunately, Richter has a tendency to despise the work of his colleagues which betrays his ambiguous relationship to German history as well as an astonishing inability to see into the consequences of his public remarks. In 2005, he urged the citizens of Salzburg to "do something about" a sculpture by his colleague Markus Lüpertz in an interview by the SPIEGEL , after describing this work as a sign of the depravation of public art sponsorship in Germany; the sculpture, an homage to Mozart, was promptly attacked by a right-wing art activist from Austria and badly damaged. Richter's extraordinary power to cow art critics into obedience may be illustrated by the fact that no discussion about his public incitement to attack the sculpture took place, nor was the attack widely discussed.


Contents

[edit] Art

Gerhard Richter's work is full of tension between depicted reality and the actuality of painting: process and material. Back to the 1950s in his time in Eastern Germany's Dresden he is known for his photo-paintings, particularly his landscapes, and his involved abstract paintings. Despite the scope of his body of work, which is commonly misunderstood as polar, Richter's paintings consistently support a unified theme that is twofold: 1. Images (and ideas and ideals) are static, superficial, and unachievable and are to be doubted; and, 2. Reality is a process of imagination and material creation and revision. Richter’s subject is the range of relationships between illusion and this reality, his painting.

The art that Richter painted is not 'art' as such. It is the result of art from the artist's mind. The multiple images that goes through the artist's mind are infinite, but he had to arrive to a conclusion in which sometimes is very difficult to do. He collected hundreds of photos from magazines, books, etc in order to arrive to a conclusion on what to paint. Thus the Atlas was born; a collection of photos, magazine or newspaper cuttings compiled in one single volume.

View of Wiesental.
View of Wiesental.

[edit] Photo-paintings and the Blur

Many of Richter's paintings are made in a multi-step process of representations. He starts with a photograph, which he has found or taken himself, and projects it onto his canvas, where he traces it for exact form. Taking his color palette from the photograph, he paints to replicate the look of the original picture. His hallmark "blur"—sometimes a softening by the light touch of a soft brush, sometimes a hard smear by an aggressive pull with his squeegee—has two effects: 1. It offers the image a photographic appearance; and 2. Paradoxically, it testifies the painter's actions, both skilled and coarse, and the plastic nature of the paint itself.

In some paintings blurs and smudges are severe enough to disrupt the image; it becomes hard to understand or believe. The subject is nullified. In these paintings, images and symbols (such as landscapes, portraits, and news photos) are rendered fragile illusions, fleeting conceptions in our constant reshaping of the world.

It is interesting to compare Richter's painting with the early work of Vija Celmins with whom he shares some similarities of subject and style.

[edit] Abstract Pictures

In his Abstract Pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of nonrepresentational painting. The paintings evolve in stages, based on his responses to the picture’s progress: the incidental details and patterns that emerge. Throughout his process, Richter uses the same techniques he uses in his representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers.

Richter’s abstract work is remarkable for the illusion of space that develops, ironically, out of his incidental process: an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving, and subtracting paint. Despite unnatural palettes, spaceless sheets of color, and obvious trails of the artist’s tools, the Abstract Pictures often act like windows through which we see the landscape outside. As in his representational paintings, there is an equalization of illusion and paint. In those paintings, he reduces worldly images to mere incidents of Art. Similarly, in his Abstract Pictures, Richter exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial logic and believability.

Nearly all of Richter’s work demonstrates both illusionistic space that seems natural and the physical activity and material of painting—as mutual interferences. For Richter, reality is the combination of new attempts to understand—to represent; in his case, to paint—the world surrounding us.

[edit] Richter and Minimalism

Eight Grey by Gerhard Richter.
Eight Grey by Gerhard Richter.

Throughout the body of Richter's work one can often observe waves of minimalism appearing often to disappear again. It may be noted that perhaps it may be necessary to view Richter as a conceptual artist wherein his individual pieces point towards a very painterly approach while possibly this may not be his intent. If one views the progressions in the individual series as single works a very different concept erupts. While many critics agree that this analysis may be necessary, let us take it one step further assuming that Richter's small series is analogous to his entire body of work, one sees the same images of realism to blur. For example Eight Grey 2002. It may be considered thus his interest is in the progression, not the individual images nor the qualities of paint nor any other medium he uses. In this a new idea of minimalism is born, a minimalism where the material means nothing however its use is technically masterful. As was said by Jan Van Eyck in the inscription on the frame of Man in the Red Turban "Als Ich Kann" which are the first words of the proverb "As I can, but not as I would."

[edit] Quotes

“One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is idiocy.” (From Richter, 'Notes 1973', in The Daily Practice of Painting, p.78.)

"Accept that I can plan nothing."[citation needed]

[edit] See Also

[edit] External links

[edit] Biographies and Ressources on Gerhard Richter

  • Jürgen Harten (ed.): "Gerhard Richter. Paintings 1962–1985". With a catalogue raisonné from Dietmar Elger 1962–1985, Cologne 1986. (In German)
  • Angelika Thill: "Catalogue raisonné since 1962". In: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH (ed.): "Gerhard Richter", Ostfildern-Ruit 1993. (Mrs. Thill offers the now accepted catalogue raisonné between 1963 and 1993, without Gerhard Richter's early works before 1962 after 1993, in German)
  • Gerhard Richter: "The Condition of History." In: Charles Harrison, & Paul Wood (Eds.), "Art in Theory 1900-1990". An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Malden/Mass. (Blackwell Publishers Ltd.), 1999.
  • Eckhart Gillen: "Gerhard Richter: Mr. Heyde or the murders are among us". The battle with the trauma of the displaced history of Western Germany. In: Eckhart Gillen: Problems in searching for the truth (…), Berlin 2002, p. 186–191. (In German)
  • Dietmar Elger: "Gerhard Richter. Painter," Cologne (Dumont-Biography) 2002. (In German) ISBN 3832158480
  • Robert Storr: "Gerhard Richter, Painting," Ostfildern-Ruit (Hatje Cantz) 2002. (In German) ISBN 3775711694
  • Dietmar Elger: "Gerhard Richter, Landscapes", Ostfildern-Ruit (Hatje Cantz) 2002. ISBN 3775791019
  • Hubertus Butin/Stefan Gronert: "Gerhard Richter. Editions 1965-2004". Catalogue raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit (Hatje Cantz) 2003/2004. ISBN 3775714308
  • Jürgen Schilling: "Gerhard Richter. A private collection", Duesseldorf 2004. (In German) ISBN 3937572007
  • Hans-Ulrich Obrist: "Gerhard Richter. 100 paintings", Ostfildern-Ruit (Hatje Cantz) 2005. (In German) ISBN 3893228519
  • Juergen Schreiber: "A painter from Germany". Gerhard Richter. A family drama, München and Zürich (Pendo publishers) 2005. (In German) ISBN 3866120583
  • Jeanne Anne Nugent: "Family Album and Shadow Archive": Gerhard Richter's East, West, and all German Painting, 1949–1966. Dissertation in the History of Art presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 2005.
  • Ernst Hohenthal: "A familiy secret in the public domain". New revelations about Gerhard Richter's Herr Heyde, in: Christies's Magazine, November 2006, New York and London 2006, ISSN 0266-1217 Vol. XXIII. No.5, S 62 f.
  • Ulrich Bischoff/Elisabeth Hipp/Jeanne Anne Nugent: "From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter": German Paintings from Dresden. Getty Trust Publications, Jean Paul Getty Museum, Cologne 2006.
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