Richter has been working on creating new images by dragging and dropping fresh paint over a photograph since 1989. In his abstract paintings, Richter creates cumulative layers of unrepresentative paint from large stripes of base color on canvas, blending and scraping, to hide the previous layers of paint and expose them. In the mid-1980s, Richter began using a homemade palette knife to rub and scrape off paint he applied in large stripes to his canvases.
The first works of art exhibited by Gerhard Richter included Abstract, a more integrated approach to abstraction, greater sensibility to surfaces and a process-oriented technique at the East German Academy.
Based on newspaper photographs and other popular sources as well as family photographs, these early works explore how photography, the dominant visual language of our time, influences the creation and perception of painting. Since the Renaissance two paradigms have shaped representation in Western painting : one comes from understanding the picture as a window to the world and the other is like a mirror reflecting what is reflected behind him.
Richter has crossed the line between photography and painting throughout his career, fascinated by the way the two seemingly opposite practices talk and challenge each other. From vibrant palette knife canvases and sharp color maps to paintings with photographic detail and close-ups of one single brushstroke, Richter effortlessly navigates between the two environments, enjoying the complexity of their relationship, never disputing one over the other. Richter’s life traces the trauma of National Socialism and the Holocaust.
Richter painted 24 images of these flickering white candles, one of which was on the cover of Sonic Youth’s album in the early 1980s, and none of them were originally sold; therefore, there is no market for these works from pre-1961, which rarely appear on the market.
Before “Birkenau” accurate digital prints of the works of the same name, as if dissolving their greatness, between the four Birkenau paintings and the four copies there are four gray mirrors and everything appears in soft lighting. For the facade of the arena, they proposed a series of stained glass windows in twenty-seven different colors, each color will appear fifty times with the distribution randomly distributed.
Uncertainty also characterizes later work, including jittery cityscapes that may be bombed out ruins or simply blurry views of an untouched city. Landscapes that can be sarcastic or sincere are those who serve as tombstones for a generation that was left without a father largely.
Gerhard Richter ( born 9 February 1932, Dresden, Germany ) is exhibiting a large retrospective next year at Met Breuer in New York (April 4 — July 5 ) in addition to Seascapes at the Guggenheim in Bilbao (September 9 ). His work has evolved throughout the years, exploring different ways of representing the world around him.
His deliberate lack of adherence to a single stylistic direction was often perceived as an attack on implicit ideologies in specific painting stories. This aversion to aesthetic dogma was interpreted as a response to his early art education in communist East Germany.
When asked about such pricelines for works of art, Richter said: “This is as absurd as the banking crisis. In 2007 he directed a short film entitled “Gerhard Richters’ Window” in which the shy artist appeared for the first time before the bank.
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