Gerhard Richter

With an artistic practice ranging over more than 40 years, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) is one of Europe’s greatest contemporary artists. In the early ‘60s he worked with, among others, Sigmar Polke, whose work can also be found in Rotations #2. Richter began exhibiting in 1962 and held a solo exhibition at Astrup Fearnley Museum in 1999, called The Art of the Impossible: Paintings 1964-1998. Now, ten years later, due to his enduring relevance, we include him in the present exhibition.

Like many artists represented in Rotations #2, Richter uses photos from mass-media. He is not, however, an appropriationist, for he uses photos as a means to expand the medium of painting. Richter in fact understands photos as a kind of readymade visual material lacking art historical associations, thus allowing him to work in a mode unfettered by conventions and traditions. Early in the 1960s he started clipping photos from magazines, using them as direct sources for paintings. This was a period when several of his contemporaries gave up painting and turned to other artistic expressions. Richter’s paintings are undergirded by photorealism, a genre mimicking photography’s seemingly truthful representation of reality. He has also developed a unique method for treating the surfaces of his paintings, giving them a slightly smeared effect. He manipulates the wet surface such that the details and contours become fuzzy (rather like what you get when you jiggle the camera the moment you take a photo). In this way Richter partly obscures the identity of the person(s) or things portrayed.

An example of this kind of work is Frau Niepenberg (1965), an almost life-size black-and-white portrait of a woman wearing a summer dress. The woman smiles and stands in a relaxed pose, but who she is and her relation to the artist is unclear. Frau Niepenberg is based on an advertisement Richter found in the German magazine 'Stern'. The woman portrayed is completely unknown to the artist; she was recruited to participate in an ad for a diet product, and Richter used part of the ad as the basis for his work. The original advertisement consisted of a text and a 'before' and 'after' picture of the woman. In Richter’s version only the work-title reveals Mrs. Niepenberg’s identity. Who she actually is and the nature of her accomplishment have been erased. Mrs. Niepenberg smiles at us and looks somehow familiar. Have we seen her somewhere before? Perhaps we recollect our own family photos, all those slightly out-of-focus snapshots. But this is a woman Richter has never met and knows nothing about; neither do we know her. Hence the portrait also contains an impersonal quality and Niepenberg becomes an image of a universal woman.

ALH