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Proof of purchase.
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One of my new year resolutions in 2020 was to go with Jennifer to New York City and check out all the major art museums. In particular, I was going to spend an entire afternoon with the Gerhard Richter exhibit at the Met. It was the first time in decades that his work had been assembled in the United States in a single, large exhibit (see tour video here).
Longtime readers know of my great admiration for Richter (see examples here and here). He is the most distinctive and diverse living visual artist that I know. His early years in the 1960's and 70's were spent with both photo paintings and abstract work. His large abstracts in the 1980's were innovative. Today they are among the most expensive and sought after paintings in the world. Richter is still a huge art and cultural phenomenon today. So, not being able to see this exhibit and make that wonderful trip to the Big Apple for several days is one of the major bummers of 2020 for me.
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Photo paintings. One of several versions of Betty from 1977. I saw the most famous one in St. Louis.
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These family photo paintings invoke the "Polaroid" aesthetic. 1993.
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As a consolation prize, I recently bought the nice semi-folio hardback, that was sold by the Met during the exhibit. Gerhard Richter: Painting After All is well-published, with an excellent reproduction quality of many of his works. The book represents the scope of the exhibit by pulling together all his many styles of painting as well as a few pieces of his glass installation art. As a result the exhibit and the book represent the full complexity of his genius.
The book contains more than 140 pages of plates featuring his diverse styles of painting, from black and white photorealism, to diffused photo paintings and landscapes, to randomized color and abstract paintings. Six essays accompanied by example photo reproductions cover the range of Richter's painting styles over the first 100 pages.
The Introduction is an interesting piece on the issues and significance of “the excavation of memory” inherently involved with putting together a massive art exhibit spanning more that 50 years of any artist's work.
An essay on Richter's famous Birkenau paintings addresses his willingness to work with the subject of human barbarism and the difficulties associated with that. Richter was one of the first artists to deeply reflect upon and express the holocaust in his early work. With an eye for detail he also exhibited a concern for the transformation of such horrific tragedy into artistic “spectacle,” not an easy challenge for him.
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The eight stages of one of the Brickenau paintings. The transformation from photorealism (the black & white photo painting is of bodies being burned in a pit during the holocaust). Richter takes a journey over several days into total abstraction of the past. 2014.
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The book features a couple of fold-out sections. This one shows all four Brickenau paintings from 2014.
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I found the essay on Richter's “family picture” painting to be especially interesting. I have always admired them but never really knew any details about them in terms of how they came about and why Richter chose to approach his intimacy with his children and other family members in such a public and experimental manner.
Another essay approaches why his earliest photo paintings were explorations of black and white and the inherent flaws of that medium in the 1960's. Later, his landscapes of clouds in the sky or icebergs on the sea built upon his earlier photorealism and extended it into diffused color for deeply effecting mood and tone.
There is an intriguing essay on what Richter was up to with his randomized color explorations which spanned decades of work. Here, the artist began with simple explorations of color patterns and then, over time, gradually pushed it to the logical extreme by blurring what began is a matrix of patterns into smooth lines of color.
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Richter pushed things to the extreme in his abstraction work with Strip, 2013. This is a detail from a much longer and taller work. He painted many color variations of this concept.
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An example of Richter's "randomized color" style. He used this technique in his famous stained-glass work at the Cologne Cathedral. 4,900 Colors. 2007.
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Every art exhibit or museum needs something to offer the viewer a break from the onslaught of whatever medium is featured. Richter's diversity of styles almost do not need such a mental and emotional pause or shifting of gears. But the exhibit featured some of his glass installation work as a repose from the painted form. This refreshes the mind for more painting but the essay included in this book also offers the reader an appreciation for what the artist was up to using simply panes of glass arrayed in various ways, sometimes representational, sometimes mere reflection.
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A close-up of the texture of one of his abstracts. Layers and layers of smeared color.
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A colorful abstract from 2016. Almost four decades of experimentation with this technique yield dozens of highly sought-after works. The entire painting is on the right with detail offered on the left.
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One striking aspect of the book and the exhibit was the inclusion of Richter's most recent abstract work. Though now 88, he has not slowed down in the 21st century. That is inspiring to see. Much of his best work has been in this century. He says he now wants to devote himself to "smaller" projects. Whether that means further exploration of existing styles or a new experimentation period is anyone's guess.
Richter's body of work covers other areas outside of painting and installation. In this century he is recognized worldwide for his work in stained glass at the Cologne Cathedral and, just this year, in what he calls his final large-scale work, a brilliant kaleidoscopic stained glass arrangement in Germany's oldest monastery. The piece from this year is some of the most beautiful stained glass work I've ever seen.
But, more than anything, Richter's life work has been about painting, after all. The title of this large exhibit is an apt one. Richter pioneered some of the world's most incredible photorealism works and his abstracts were unique for their time. They are still powerful experiences today. Which is why I am disappointed that I didn't get to see so many of them grouped together in this exhibit. I didn't see the art but I got the equivalent of the tee-shirt, a really well-done book published by the Met to remind me of a trip that wasn't.
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The back of the hardbound book shows a very close detail of how Richter uses brushes and different scalpels to create his textured, layered and flowing effect.
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