Richter, Gerhardt
German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces.
Photo-paintings and the "blur"
Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on a variety of sources: newspapers and books, sometimes incorporating their captions, (as in Helga Matura (1966)); private snapshots; aerial views of towns and mountains, (Cityscape Madrid (1968) and Alps (1968)); seascapes (1969–70); and a large multipart work made for the German Pavilion in the 1972 Venice Biennale. For Forty-eight Portraits (1971–72), he chose mainly the faces of composers such as Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, and of writers such as H. G. Wells and Franz Kafka.[17]
Abstract work
Coming full-circle from his early Table (1962) in which he cancelled his photorealist image with haptic swirls of grey paint,[36] in 1969, Richter produced the first of a group of grey monochromes that consist exclusively of the textures resulting from different methods of paint application.
In 1976, Richter first gave the title Abstract Painting to one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few words to name and explain it, he felt he was "letting a thing come, rather than creating it." In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of non-representational painting, beginning with brushing big swaths of primary color onto canvas.[37] 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.[38]
From the mid-1980s, Richter began to use a homemade squeegee to rub and scrape the paint that he had applied in large bands across his canvases.[38] In an interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloch in 1986, Richter was asked about his "Monochrome Grey Pictures and Abstract Pictures" and their connection with the artists Yves Klein and Ellsworth Kelly. The following are Richter's answers:
The Grey Pictures were done at a time when there were monochrome paintings everywhere. I painted them nonetheless. ... Not Kelly, but Bob Ryman, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Yves Klein and many others.[39]
In the 1990s the artist began to run his squeegee up and down the canvas in an ordered fashion to produce vertical columns that take on the look of a wall of planks.[38]
Color chart paintings
As early as 1966, Richter had made paintings based on colour charts, using the rectangles of colour as found objects in an apparently limitless variety of hue; these culminated in 1973–4 in a series of large-format pictures such as 256 Colours.[17] Richter painted three series of Color Chart paintings between 1966 and 1974, each series growing more ambitious in their attempt to create through their purely arbitrary arrangement of colors.[45] The artist began his investigations into the complex permutations of color charts in 1966, with a small painting entitled 10 Colors.[46] The charts provided anonymous and impersonal source material, a way for Richter to disassociate color from any traditional, descriptive, symbolic or expressive end. When he began to make these paintings, Richter had his friend Blinky Palermo randomly call out colors, which Richter then adopted for his work. Chance thus plays its role in the creation of his first series.
Returning to color charts in the 1970s, Richter changed his focus from the readymade to the conceptual system, developing mathematical procedures for mixing colours and chance operations for their placement.[47] The range of the colors he employed was determined by a mathematical system for mixing the primary colors in graduated amounts. Each color was then randomly ordered to create the resultant composition and form of the painting. Richter's second series of Color Charts was begun in 1971 and consisted of only five paintings. In the final series of Color Charts which preoccupied Richter throughout 1973 and 1974, additional elements to this permutational system of color production were added in the form of mixes of a light grey, a dark gray and later, a green.
Sculpture
Richter began to use glass in his work in 1967, when he made Four Panes of Glass.[49] These plain sheets of glass could tilt away from the poles on which they were mounted at an angle that changed from one installation to the next. In 1970, he and Blinky Palermo jointly submitted designs for the sports facilities for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. For the front of the arena, they proposed an array of glass windows in twenty-seven different colors; each color would appear fifty times, with the distribution determined randomly. In 1981, for a two-person show with Georg Baselitz in Düsseldorf, Richter produced the first of the monumental transparent mirrors that appear intermittently thereafter in his oeuvre; the mirrors are significantly larger than Richter's paintings and feature adjustable steel mounts. For pieces such as Mirror Painting (Grey, 735-2) (1991), the mirrors were coloured grey by the pigment attached to the back of the glass.[50] Arranged in two rooms, Richter presented an ensemble of paintings and colored mirrors in a special pavilion designed in collaboration with architect Paul Robbrecht at Documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992.[51]
Drawings
In 2010, the Drawing Center showed Lines which do not exist, a survey of Richter's drawings from 1966 to 2005, including works made using mechanical intervention such as attaching a pencil to an electric hand drill. It was the first career overview of Richter in the United States since 40 Years of Painting at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002.[54] In a review of Lines which do not exist, R. H. Lossin wrote in The Brooklyn Rail: "Viewed as a personal (and possibly professional) deficiency, Richter's drawing practice consisted of diligently documenting something that didn't work—namely a hand that couldn't draw properly. ...Richter displaces the concept of the artist's hand with hard evidence of his own, wobbly, failed, and very material appendage."[55]
