VTV Classics (r3): Gerhard Richter: Paintings from Private Collections (2008)
Saturday, September 20, 2008 00 01 BST First Edition Saturday, September 20, 2008 00 01 BST.
A short dark history of looking Meinhof DeLillo describes a meeting between two strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York The meeting takes place in the October 18 presentation room 1977 1988 Gerhard Richter remarkable result of 15 paintings on ruminant alleged murder of police suicide death of Andreas Baader and other members of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang in a German prison in 1977 man in history, it appears, is killing time between job interviews the woman, however, is subservient to the cycle of paintings.
I realize now that the first day, I was watching just thought I was looking for, but I was getting a little bare idea of what's in these paintings I m only just beginning to look I think I feel helpless These tables make me feel how helpless a person can be.
She developed an obsession with multiple images of Ulrike Meinhof dead in his cell the head, neck, rope burns, hair mouth pasted in a picture that appears almost natural elsewhere; two paintings of Andreas Baader dead on the floor of his cell, the head of the same profile; large canvases impasto the crowd at the funeral, the three coffins pale hoisted on the shoulders, through them.
She took the day back after day to interrogate the gray blur of gray tones paintings based on photographs found in police files and tabloids, and immerse themselves in the winter, but apparently consoling light from their surfaces, enjoying a transcendent experience of the genre like Mark Rothko report people were in front of his paintings, and that pilgrims still travel to the Matisse chapel in Vence, for example, or the Rothko chapel in Houston to share.
The people who weep before my pictures, Rothko noted, have the same religious experience I had when I painted them That people crying face his pictures showed that he was communicating basic human emotions This was a cross It seen as cross DeLillo writes watching Meinhof, and it made her feel, right or wrong, that there was a pardon element in the picture, both men and women, the terrorists are not au beyond forgiveness.
Gerhard Richter is not a believer in all that I do not believe it is the most famous thing he said, equivalent Warhol s I want to be a machine and the belief that everyone should be like everyone else i want to be like everyone else, think about what everyone thinks, do what is done anyway Richter, Notes 1964.
I consider that the belief of all kinds of astrology every high religion and all the great ideologies, superfluous and mortally dangerous, Richter said that we no longer need these things that we need to develop different strategies against the poverty and injustice, war and disasters.
Born in 1932 in Dresden, Richter was a child in Nazi era Germany his mother's brother, Uncle Rudi, whose portrait he painted later died a young Nazi officer, while mentally handicapped aunt Richter was imprisoned in a camp Hitler euthanasia, he fled the eastern bloc and the Criminal idealism socialist Düsseldorf few months before the Berlin Wall in August 1961 increased by art, he wrote, has always been essentially the agony, despair and hopelessness the art world, however, is entirely superficial openings, dealer, play social game became them in the form of art they have long or all at least largely taken its place.
Thirteen years under National Socialism Sixteen years under communism is German, his official biography reads Followed, it could add, nearly a half-century of what Richter has repeatedly alleged jokingly called Capitalist Realism in west.
Although new paintings, he shows next week at the Serpentine Gallery in London was born of the masterful stained glass, geometric patterns he designed for the south transept of the Cologne Cathedral, unveiled in August last year, atmospheric paintings evoke Richter is normally favorable to transport the viewer to a spiritual world.
It seems temperamentally better suited to build secure object court for the trial of the Baader Meinhof group in a field a few hundred yards from the Stammheim prison in a suburb of Stuttgart in the mid 70's single-storey building was surrounded by a high steel fence and lit at night, and armed police patrolled with guard dogs inside the window, lit artificially, technologically well equipped, utility and atmospherically courtroom space age, Jillian Becker in his book Hitler's children, prisoners were sitting in a line wearing similar loose jeans and black sweaters, thin their hunger strikes and jail pallor on their faces It is an emotional climate - wan, dejected sinister and little cruel - reproduced in the work of a generation of young artists that could reasonably be considered co even children Richter quintessential Luc Tuymans, Marlene Dumas and Gregor Schneider.
Richter began to social realism in East Germany; then, when it came to the west, was immediately taken back by the onslaught of pop art in America This put him at odds with Georg Baselitz, his near contemporary and fellow fugitive of the GDR, who denounced and denied both mass culture and photography, which for many years formed the basis of the art of Richter.
From the beginning, Richter painted what its website describes as images without glory; pictures that made ordinary ridiculous; ordinary tragic; Many ordinary beautiful amateur photographs, he said once more beautiful than Cezanne.
Under the general title picture paints, click a category - C includes candles, cars, clouds, corrugated iron, curtains; D begins with the death - and you are presented with pictures of dumb insolence and confusing Neutrality subcategory daily life brings paintings called Pedestrians, Working in the garden, the man on the phone on the buildings, we get Small Car Park, Small church, Gray House, Corridor under the icons, household, kitchen chair Pillow picture toilet paper several versions of the same, almost empty-up Izal issue prison roll.
It is almost as if, in these modest, most of the black and white paintings, Richter stumbled across cheap pictures more or less accidentally, then spent a week or more translate into painting, which is about what happened throughout his career, he showed a distrust of intention, he always refused the idea of the masterpiece or inspiration, and preferred instead to rely on the readymades and chance images in the tables are almost without exception based on images torn from newspapers and magazines, or snaps taken with a cheap camera They are still impoverished or deformed by being made to be blurred or bleached or ham-fistedly underexposed.
I hate dazzlement skill, Richter wrote as a young man of 32, in 1964, for example, be able to draw Freehand something in life, or - even worse - invent or develop something completely completely original, a particular form, a particular composition or a range of eccentric colors I want to leave everything as it is me then neither a plan nor invent; I add nothing and omit nothing Being able to do something is never a reason to do so.
In the 1970s, in apparent contradiction of his younger self, Richter began using black and white color was becoming too aesthetics and turn the hand abstract painting, but it was the manner of gestural abstraction expressionist abstract, with all the performative gum carpets and existential anxiety disorder properly and clinically removed.
In his 2003 lectures Mellon, former chief curator of painting at MoMA, Kirk Varnedoe, describes Richter as part-time abstractionist a category in which he also placed Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly Before World War II, Varnedoe said, abstraction was the end point it was something that you arrived at after you've tried everything else it was absolute for Richter, far from being an end of the line distillation, abstract art is an option among others, be taken up and set again he chose.
Richter is not a clarification painter, Varnedoe said, but doubtfully painter, who lives permanently with yes, but like Warhol, he participated simultaneously representing and haunting ghost of abstraction But unlike Warhol he works in abstraction from the inside, as an absolute abstract painter, and shuttles between a form of photographic realism and a form of abstraction images lacks heart of their mechanical nature made them very difficult to like there was something sour and cooling on the colors Richter what abstractions and fuzzy mark, figurative photo paintings had in common was the cold nature, deadpan, without engagement of engagement with the subject and subject distance so different from the old abstract expressionists crispy ideals of sincerity and good faith.
Part of the attraction of Richter for young artists was his refusal to accept that success means having a style but Damien Hirst a longtime admirer of Richter's, believes that the images of the skin is what makes Richters are clearly identified; his work has always and never on what Richter himself called smooth surface equalizing The material is secondary, Hirst said the unifying thing is the surface the real care has gone into the surface of each painting Photographs don t have surface, it is what differentiates the tables is that the paint left s like Richter takes a lapping, moving, delicate surface and hangs the picture on top of it he could have been rolled into a sheet they are like candy or chocolate they melt.
Hirst is an artist who has a debt to the color side of the practice Richter, he was always happy to acknowledge the mid-60s, Richter began to make paintings that reproduced the kind of color sample cards which can be picked up in any hardware shop he was interested in was smooth perfection and accuracy in color reproduction with minimal composition They were sober, impartial and anonymous.
Hirst saw Richter reproductions large color graphic tables size billboard as a student, and many years later, was invited to adopt the same strategies chance, seriality and mesh layout with its paintings on site, a raft that went under the hammer at Sotheby's we talked on Monday about Richter was a kind of chat sales Richter works displacement activity also in the high millions Hirst is far from alone in considering it among the greatest living painters in the world.
Hirst commented in the past that the paintings on site could be what art looks like seen through a microscope imaginary A scientific approach to painting as pharmaceutical companies scientific approach to life Writing in the catalog accompanying 4900 colors at the Serpentine remark, Birgit Pelzer of the work that Richter painted color charts have tried to be as far as possible from Emotive and sublime lyricism of expression and their goal was to take art to the edge its own destruction.
For several years, Richter painted the color card commercial that found with white grid between the colored rectangles, only on a large scale sometime in the 70s, he introduced chance and random selection in composition; colors were numbered, and the numbers pulled from a hat Finally, separation margins were allowed to disappear, and gross released color from rubbing against the raw color The effect it unwittingly imitated another photographic effect pixelation - electronic jamming - except that digital hadn t been invented yet brilliant, vulgar, modern colors like David Batchelor wrote, in bright collisions, vulgar, modern with other bright colors, vulgar, modern.
In his book Chromophobia, Batchelor distinguishes between what he calls the commercial digital color paintings that come out of a tin and analog color paintings by artists emerging from color tube Analogical is a continuum, a spectrum of a fusion of one color into another digital color is individuated; it is in the form of discrete units; no emergence or modulation; there are as borders, the steps and edges.
The postwar period was the color in art digitizing This, Batchelor argues persuasively, was a new color design more urban colors as the colors of nature artificial colors, colors city, industrial colors the colors that are compatible with the images, materials and forms of urban art, industrial.
In August 2007, the city of Cologne has revealed surprising new window for the south transept of the Cologne Cathedral Richter The original window was destroyed during the Second World War and replaced with clear glass in 1948. Nearly 60 years later, Richter has chosen to fill the Gothic tracery sections with thousands of grid points, the squares of color that suggested the beginning, the Magi stained glass images and saints were pushed through a processor to digital breaking point hyperchromatic.
The seemingly arbitrary color distribution in Cologne was generated using a computer program specially developed, and renewed interest in the use of chance to determine the Richter composition led him to develop the idea of 4900 colors Serpentine.
In this latest work, acrylic chips are randomly selected, spray-painted, and glued on aluminum foil Random program has an instant collection and seemingly countless colorful groups, the catalog explains, adopting the tones of a public service announcement computer executes instructions without conscience or judgment, without intuition or will, without feelings or inductive thinking we are in the universe finite and infinite numbers where the calculation process turned into a production role was deleted All human body.
Why a painter has a series of 49 panels of identical size, identical gridded to industrial manufacture of paint chips and present them as a single exposure.
Already in 1966, Richter wrote I steer clear definitions I do not know what I want, I incoherent, evasive, passive; I like the indefinite, the infinite; I love the uncertainty continues Other qualities can be conducive to the realization, advertising, success; but they are all outworn - as outworn ideologies, opinions, concepts and names of things.
He added now that there are no priests or left philosophers, artists are the most important people in the world is the only thing that interests me.
Gerhard Richter 4900 Colors Version II is at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2, from 23 September to 16 November 7402 Details 020 6075.
This article was modified Tuesday, September 23, 2008, a newsletter publishing means that we have located the Chapel of the Rosary, which Matisse designed and decorated in Venice is in Vence, southern France This has been corrected.
Gordon Burn on the paintings of Gerhard Richter Books The Guardian, burn, paint, gerhard, richter.