Posted By Tom on January 4, 2012

A major new retrospective reveals the singular beauty and dynamism of the work of one the world’s most important living artists. Dr John Roberts reports…

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (1990), CR:726, Tate. Purchased 1992 © Gerhard Richter. Photo: Lucy Dawkins.

Panorama, Tate Modern’s major retrospective of acclaimed German artist Gerhard Richter, runs until the 8th of January 2012. Coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday and spanning nearly half a century of activity, the exhibition provides a near-comprehensive survey of Richter’s remarkable career. Curated by Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey, Panorama superbly demonstrates why Richter is considered by many, especially following the passing of Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud, to be one of the most important and most collectible artists working today.

Much of Richter’s appeal stems from the incredible range of his work. His virtuosic technical proficiency, no matter what medium or style he is engaged with, is testament to his skill and ambition. He has, throughout his career, maintained a defiant negotiation between abstract and  figurative modes of representation. The scope of Richter’s concerns has taken his work into what could be considered wildly contrasting territories, from restrained minimalism and post-photographic realism to audacious, large-scale colour abstractions. Yet Richter is an artist of enormous intelligence whose reflections on his work outline an overall consistency to his approach. The resultant body of work is an impressive exploratory engagement concerning the power of images and their ability to contain and represent our lives.

Aspects of Richter’s own life often make their way into his work, almost always through the medium of photography. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter repeatedly returns to difficult periods in Germany’s history. Early works use images of Allied bombing campaigns during the Second World War, including the savage firebombing of the artist’s hometown. Richter has also contrasted the fates of family members in relation to the war and the National Socialists, with one painting based on an image of the artist’s uncle dressed in Wehrmacht uniform, while another focuses on a snapshot of an aunt murdered during the Nazis’ eugenics program.

Having lived under Fascism and postwar Communism, Richter eventually made a break for the West by moving to Düsseldorf in 1961. Although he was already making a living as a mural painter, it was not until this break that his life as an artist began in earnest. An immediate subject for the developing painter was West German consumerism and popular imagery, which would soon be followed by his first explorations of abstraction.

Domestic and international affairs have been recurrent themes throughout Richter’s career. In the late 1980s Richter explored the subject of terrorism (and its representation), notably in October 18, 1977, a persistently controversial and ambiguous series of black and white paintings based on documentary photographs associated with the Red Army Faction (commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group). Active in Germany in the late 1970s, led by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, the RAF sought to change society through violent intervention. Much later, in 2001, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City also caught Richter’s eye. His treatment of one particular image of the Twin Towers not only functions to convey the artist’s wariness of fixed ideas or ideologically driven dogma, but also his interest in the framing of images, exploring how they can be ‘smeared’ by overuse or drained by endless media-led repetitions. Richter always seems to emphasise how flimsy images can be, whether transmitted via pixels on screens or embedded into the weave of canvas.

Richter’s use of the photographic images is a key aspect of his work. Its importance is evident in Atlas, the exhaustive archive of reference images that the artist has been collecting for all his working life. Yet more important than Richter’s treatment of these photographs is the criteria by which he chooses them. For his selections are always pointed and articulate, whether they have personal connotations (such as portraits of family members), if they relate to art historical images (references to Titian or Duchamp, for example) or if they contain an inherent aesthetic mystery. In all cases, Richter tries to emphasise a common ground in relation to how images transmit information about private and public realities.

The processes Richter uses on photographic images produce singular results. In his most iconic pieces, all firm edges have been blurred by the artist’s dragging of his brush laterally over the surface of the paint. This is a literal feathering of the borders between realism and abstraction. The quality of uncertainty in these paintings echoes the type of equivocation and doubt that Richter himself has often expressed in his writings and interviews. However, if Richter does reference a ‘lack of conviction’, this is not to imply any technical shortcoming or lack of faith in painting on his part. It is more an openly acknowledged questioning of the truths contained in, or available through, images.

Richter calls upon supreme technical skill in his photo-paintings as well as his other more abstract works. These expansive recent canvases, often on a vast scale, involve Richter using a squeegee to move colour around in great swipes. The finished works, redolent of disrupted visual signals, could be associated with the work of Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko, yet they contain their own unique intimacies. For all the size and grandeur of these pieces, the textural subtleties on display give an insight into their careful and disciplined construction.

Taken as a whole, Richter’s work is an appeal to the doubts and convictions inherent in the visual. His treatment of photographs suggests that the ostensibly firm grip of the photographic image can be loosened and the fixity we think we can rely on is often not so secure. Richter exploits questions about the fidelity of perception and representation, questioning how effectively images can hold on to their secrets. His painting is also an analysis of painting, not in the sense of trying to confirm the greatly exaggerated rumours of its demise, but rather as an exemplary case whereby an artist puts his medium to work in and on the world, examining itself as part of that world. Richter’s answers to the problems of painting remain essentially painterly because, for him, that remains the most eloquent response that highlights and celebrates the medium’s unique powers of address.

More information can be found at http://www.tate.org.uk

Categories: Artist News, Must-See Exhibitions
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