Interrogating the Image

Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter came of age in a rapidly shifting political and cultural landscape, first joining the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1951, before relocating to West Germany just before the construction of the Berlin Wall. Enrolling at the Dusseldorf Academy in 1961 Richter found an energetic artistic community, one especially taken with a then-ascendent Pop Art, and the utopian possibilities explored by collective, international movements such as Fluxus and ZERO. By 1963, Richter had already started collaborating more closely with Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, their so-called ‘Capitalist Realism’ movement founded in response to the rise of consumer culture and flood of visual media that started to dominate the cultural landscape in Germany during these years.

The stark ideological differences played out between East and West Germany highlighted for Richter the contingency of such rigid stances, establishing in him a deep distrust towards any claims to absolute truth. This would deeply impact his approach to artmaking, and the sustained interest in the relationship between photography and painting which has underpinned his entire career. Insisting on the fundamentally illusionistic nature of painting and asking viewers to consider their own, mediated experience of reality, Richter began to paint from black and white family photographs and newspaper cut-outs. Now collected together in Atlas, Richter has continued to build and work from this vast archive of images over the years, offering clear insight into the role played by the photographic image in his practice.

Painting directly from photographs or using other imaging tools such as the projector to map out these compositions, Richter also introduced a blurring technique in his application of paint ‘at once emphasising the work’s identity as a painting and evoked the look of an unfocused or moving subject in a readymade photograph.’ Challenging the autonomy and assumed veracity of the image in this way, Richter’s blurred monochromatic photo-paintings carry some of the alienating strangeness of Surrealist photographic experiments by the likes of Man Ray and Dora Maar. However, in their commitment to a specifically German context of post-war identity and cultural consciousness, they move this into markedly different territory which he would later expand further as he engaged more directly with the legacy of German Romanticism in his exquisitely rendered landscapes.

Man Ray, Ruby Richards with Diamonds, c. 1938, Private Collection. Artwork: © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023.

Gerhard Richter, Portrait Liz Kertelge, 1966.

Image and Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2023 (0036).

Invited to represent West Germany in the XXXVI Biennale di Venezia in 1972, Richter’s reputation grew steadily in these years, the artist not only producing a vast, experimental, and at times seemingly contradictory body of work, but reaching new levels of international acclaim with a series of significant solo exhibitions in some of the most prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 1978 and 1980, and London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1979. As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, Richter also became more preoccupied with questions of abstraction, devoting most of his Notes of the 1980s to ‘the appearance, interpretation, and development of his abstract paintings.’ In a particularly famous statement made in conjunction with his presentation at documenta 7 in 1982 Richter concluded: ‘Abstract paintings are like fictitious models because they visualise a reality which we can neither see nor describe but which we nevertheless conclude exists […] we create a better means of approaching what can neither be seen nor understood because abstract painting illustrates with the greatest clarity.’

As Richter embarked on this body of work in the early 1980s, once again, it was photography that proved essential in developing this new avenue in his practice. Working on smaller scale oil studies which he then photographed, Richter projected an enlarged detail onto canvas, reproducing an abstracted motif of the original study in paint. Copies in paint of photographic reproductions of smaller studies, the so-called Soft Abstracts that he first embarked on in 1977 succinctly undermined the ‘heroic’ narrative of mid-century Abstract Expressionism and its privileging of the romantic paintergenius figure acting instantly and intuitively in front of the canvas. Although very different in its execution, we might bring Roy Lichtenstein’s Little Big Painting to mind here, a work which similarly employs elements of mechanical reproduction and technological intervention to undercut abstraction’s fetishization of the ‘expressive connection usually expected between a painter and his media.’

As Camille Morineau explains, even after Richter moves beyond the need of a photographic support, the works produced in the early 1980s are a direct result of this process and represent a narrow window into Richter’s production before the squeegee became more dominant as a tool for overall treatment. In Morineau’s own words, ‘what we tend to find in the abstract paintings of 1981 to 1984, the years following the Soft abstracts, Stroke, and the first squeegee paintings, is that the three aspects of the blow-up process can be combined into the same work. In a single painting we might find a ‘soft’ form that seems to be based on an enlarged image of an abstract sketch; an inflated single brushstroke; and a portion of the canvas that has been traversed by a squeegee.’

It is this deft combination of its constituent parts that gives Mathis such vibrancy and verve, a compelling presentation of what Richter would term his ‘free abstracts’ – works produced without photographic support which, nevertheless, retain the visual qualities of these enlarged motifs.

Raking away layers of paint by dragging across the damp surface, localised sections recreate the visual effect of the blown-up image of a brushstroke, at once concealing and revealing the layers beneath. Optically disorientating, these gossamer light veils of colour generate fascinatingly fluid effects, appearing as more solid from far away and dissolving into beaded drops of paint as we move closer. Alongside the luminous contrasts of vibrant, unmixed planes of colour, it is these rich surface textures and the shifts between impasto, softer passages, and certain mechanical interventions that give these early 80s paintings their unique character.

Building on a modernist legacy of work interested in the interplay of flatness and three-dimensionality, painterly control and chance, and a deep investment in questions of artistic process, Richter’s visually stunning and conceptually rigorous Abstraktes Bilder radically reframed the question of abstraction at the close of the 20th century. In the place of expressive immediacy and intuition, Richter placed a more searching inquiry into the nature of perception and reality and of our own relationship to the image at the heart of his Abstraktes Bilder project. In his own words, ‘Abstract pictures do indeed show something, they just show things that don’t exist. But they still follow the same requirements as figurative works: they need a setup, structure. You need to be able to look at it and say, ‘It’s almost something.’ But it’s actually representing nothing. It pulls feelings out of you, even as it’s showing you a scene that technically isn’t there.’

127.