Helmut Friedel on Gerhard Richter
In his lecture on Gerhard Richter, Helmut Friedel focuses on the ambiguity between realism and abstraction in the artist's paintings. His starting point for these observations is a letter from Franz Marc to his wife Maria, which was written during the First World War, a few days before his death. Marc wrote that he had painted several "Kandinsky's" to camouflage their military position at the front. In contrast, Kandinsky invented abstraction - as he wrote in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) - to reveal the unseen.