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Gerhard Richter
dal 25/2/2009 al 30/5/2009
Saturday - Wednesday 10-18

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Neil Evans


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Gerhard Richter



 
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25/2/2009

Gerhard Richter

National Portrait Gallery, London

During a career spanning almost fifty years, the astonishing range of his work has become a defining characteristic, with painting at the centre of his development. From the outset portraits have been a recurring theme and this landmark exhibition explores this important aspect of Richter's work in unprecedented detail. Covering the period from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition comprises key paintings from international public and private collections.


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Gerhard Richter is widely regarded as one of the world's leading contemporary artists. During a career spanning almost fifty years, the astonishing range of his work has become a defining characteristic, with painting at the centre of his development. Within that medium his scope and output have been prodigious and as a result Richter is seen by many as the greatest living painter.

From the outset portraits have been a recurring theme and this landmark exhibition explores this important aspect of Richter's work in unprecedented detail. Covering the period from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition comprises key paintings from international public and private collections, many of which have not previously been shown together.

Early black and white paintings made from magazine photographs such as Mutter und Tochter (B), 1964, and portraits of close members of the artist's family such as Betty, 1977, are complemented by a special installation of Richter's celebrated 48 Portraits, 1971-2. A remarkable recent painting, Ella, 2007, is shown here for the first time.
Collectively, the exhibition illuminates Richter's compelling but unconventional approach to portraiture. By obscuring the identities of the people depicted and questioning the relationships between them, Richter's portraits provide a fascinating insight into the way we view the world.

In 1962 Richter began to make portraits and other works copied from found photographs. Unwilling to continue in his earlier, abstract style, and yet wary of inventing pictures based on observation and interpretation, he had been seeking instead a more direct and objective way of representing the world. Therefore, a photograph, being machine-made, was in his view 'the most perfect picture'. Using photographs as the basis for paintings freed him from conventional artistic processes involving the creation of motifs, colour, composition and expression.

Richter's subject matter was wide, and from the outset portraits were a dominant theme. But his attitude to portraiture was unconventional. Depicting both recognisable and anonymous individuals he commented: 'I don't think the painter need either see or know the sitter. A portrait must not express anything of the sitter's 'soul', essence or character. Nor must a painter 'see' a sitter in any specific, personal way...' Richter's portraits express the central theme of his work. By presenting an inscrutable surface, they intimate that reality cannot be seen or known but remains hidden beneath a veneer of appearance.

In addition to photographs from newspapers and magazines, from around 1964 Richter began also to use snapshots from old family albums as the basis for paintings. Unlike the more glamorous or sensational media images used by contemporary American and British Pop artists, such amateur photographs appealed to Richer because they were so familiar and ordinary. He commented: 'everyone has produced his own "devotional pictures": these are the likenesses of family and friends, preserved in remembrance of them'.

The paintings that resulted appear strange because, although enlarged from the original images, they are impressed, unmistakably, with the visual language of the family snapshot. Whether the individuals portrayed are shown on a beach, against a snowy backdrop, or positioned awkwardly in a domestic setting, such painted images convey a sense of viewing the subject or scene through the lens of a camera. This contradictory impression draws attention to the conventions underpinning the photographic original. By blurring the image, Richter suggests that the painting is an imprecise representation of reality. The essential nature of figures we see remains mysterious.

Whether drawn from the media or based on family photographs, Richter's source images were intentionally 'banal'. The resulting paintings assert nothing definite, draw attention to no particular facet or feature, and avoid making a specific point. This avoidance tactic deflects the universal human instinct to seek meaning in the appearance of people and things. By frustrating that process, Richter's portraits draw attention to the inscrutable nature of appearance. By depicting people in a range of ordinary situations, the paintings are open to a range of interpretations. In this way, the portraits convey a universal human predicament: the desire to understand the world and a corresponding inability to know anything with any certainty.
From the mid-1960s, Richter's portraits increasingly sustain this tension between inviting yet resisting interpretation. Some appear innocuous while others, notably Herr Heyde, which depicts a Nazi war criminal, strike a darker note. Of the way such images appear ambiguous or tantalizingly enigmatic, Richter commented: 'You realise that you can’t represent reality at all – that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality'.

In addition to portraits of family members, from around 1964 Richter made a number of portraits of dealers, collectors, artists and others connected with his immediate professional circle.

Among the earliest were three portraits of the art dealer Alfred Schmela, one of which is shown here. Schmela gave Richter his first one-man show in Dusseldorf in 1964. In the same year, Richter painted a full-length portrait of Arnold Bode, the influential curator of the Documenta 2 exhibition which in 1959 first brought Richter's attention to a range of contemporary art. Also in 1964, Richter painted several portraits of Willy Schniewind, who was among the artist's first collectors.
From 1966, as well as photographs given to him by others, Richter began using photographs he had taken as the basis for portraits. In 1971 he painted the portrait of the artist Brigid Polk who was closely associated with Warhol's circle basing this on Polk's photographs. The portrait of the British artists Gilbert and George, which replicates the multiple exposures of Richter's original photograph, belongs to the mid-1970s.

Richter's use of his own private photographs heralded, from the late 1970s, a body of portraits connected with his inner circle of family and close friends. Such intimate subjects and personal themes seem, at first, to stand in stark contrast to the impersonal nature of his early work but Richter's recent portraits continue to explore the preoccupations that have been present from the outset, being both open to the viewer's gaze, yet impenetrable.

This characteristic may be observed in Richter's two portraits of Betty, his daughter, made in 1977 and 1988 respectively. The first possesses a stark, confrontational clarity. The second is softer and the subject turns away. The three portraits titled IG were made in 1993 and depict the artist's second wife, who is also depicted from behind. Lesende (1994) portrays Sabine Moritz, whom Richter married in 1995, shown absorbed in the pages of a magazine. The same averted gaze connects the artist's self-portrait of 1996 with the portrait of Ella, his youngest daughter, which was painted in 2007 and is shown here for the first time. Though personal, there is a sense that these portraits remain, as Richt

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