Gerhard Richter (1932, Germany): Works. Part I Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and after training in the East, moved to West Germany in 1961. He was part of a group of painters working in Düsseldorf, that included Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, who turned to image-based painting during the emergence of American Pop art. Gerhard Richter has been painting his abstract paintings since the 1970s. Today they comprise two-thirds of all his work. In the mid-1980s Gerhard Richter produced an unusual number of large format paintings, frequently in series of three or four works. These paintings - with all their formal analogies - are characterized by a graphic multiformality and form an open work group. A main concern of the artist was to overcome the randomness of visual experience and to heighten the individual effect of color and form. Gerhard Richter applies the elements and structures of paint with brushes, squeegees and palette knives, so that the already existing layers are overlapped or completely obliterated by new ones. The traces of these tools and the layers of paint combine to create structures of spatial or landscape impressions without their consolidating into a recognizable object. Arbitrariness, chance, coincidence and destruction allow a specific type of painting to emerge but never a predetermined image. For Richter this multi-layered manner of painting is not based on a found motif or existing image; the artist, rather, works his way free of all motif specifications.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 10:10:04 +0000
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