Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern.
Richter is one of the most important contemporary artists and one of my favourites. He has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, but also photographs and glass pieces.
You can see more of his work here , here , and here . There are also some very realistic paintings by Richter in my previous post , very unlike the abstracts in this post, exemplifying the diversity of his artistic output.
These six painting were conceived by Gerhard Richter as a coherent group, named after the American experimental composer John Cage.
Since the 1980s, Richter has frequently made abstract works by applying layers of paint, and then wiping a squeegee across the surface. As the upper layers of paint are dragged across the canvas, earlier moments from the painting's creation are allowed to resurface.
The Cage paintings are the outcome of several layers of painting and erasure. Their surfaces are animated by lines where the squeegee has paused, by brushstrokes, other scrapings, and areas where the skin of oil paint has dried and rippled. The paint seems delicate and fluid in some areas, coarser and more solid in others.
Richter was listerning to the music of John Cage while he worked on these paintings and titled them after the composer. There are no direct links between any particular work in this series and any piece of music by Cage. However, Richter has long been interested in Cage's ideas about ambient sound and silence, as well as his controlled use of chance procedures in musical composition.
Hi Eirene
ReplyDeleteI think Richter is fascinating.
His photography paintings are really beautiful and deep.
For me, I really love his reds which are alluring.
e.g. https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/paintings/abstracts/abstracts-19951999-58/abstract-painting-8274
Thanks for the comment and the link, Liam. Fascinating is a good word to describe Richter's art. I like all of his work, representational, photography paintings and abstract - it's such a pleasure when I come across anything of his. I have also been fascinated by his Baader-Meinhoff paintings
Deletehttps://a-place-called-space.blogspot.com/2012/04/gerhard-richter.html
His photography paintings are v. moving and beautiful, and a show a deep and thoughtful approach that sets him apart in contemporary art. I find the blurring in his photo-paintings to be a v. moving intimation to the transience of life. I hope to visit a retrospective of his in the coming years in London. I am sad I missed that Tate exhibition of 2011. I have also come across the Baader-Meinhoff paintings, and there is a certain pathos to the paintings. A sense of shabiness despondency and anomie. They are quite moving.
DeleteI am currently studying the early renaissance and the transition away from gothic and byzantine. I use my blog as a way of writing about it and teaching myself.
I noticed in the blog you linked you said "By leaving the East, Richter left all of his friends and family behind - in fact he was never to see his parents again.". Why was that the case? Could you not even visit see your family again across the berlin wall?
I agree with everything you say about Richter - I have been a fan since the first time I saw one of his paintings. Also, the wide range and variety of his oeuvre is so staggering.
DeleteI too use my blog to learn about art, to think about what I have seen and to make sense of it all. It's also a personal diary of what I have seen and done.
As for the Berlin wall, people died or were killed trying to go to the other side. He might have been able to go to East Berlin, but he would not be able to get out again.