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10/10/2002

Gerhard Richter

Guggenheim Museum, Berlin

Eight Gray

Eight monumental, movable glass surfaces enameled in gray and mounted on the walls reflect both the interior and exterior space as well as the viewer himself. With this precise and consistent installation, the series of window and mirror works started by Richter in the sixties reaches a preliminary climax.

Gerhard Richter's work group is the eighth commissioned work which has been created especially for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin.

"I believe that truth has only one face: that of violent contradiction."
-George Bataille

Over the past four decades Gerhard Richter has established a reputation as one of the most influential artists of our time. He has achieved this without restricting himself to a single style. His remarkably varied production includes sculptural objects as well as paintings, which range from landscapes to colorful abstractions to gray monochromes. Richter's manipulation of numerous pictorial conventions reflects his interest in the nature of looking itself and the perceptual models we use to conceptualize our world. Born in Dresden in 1932, and having grown up during the period of National Socialism, the artist has been critical of all forms of ideology and has avoided it in his work, rejecting the urge to privilege one visual form over another, and not subscribing to any "ism." It has also inspired him to eliminate a subjective, authorial voice. This detachment is evident throughout Richter's oeuvre, including the use of found photography in his photo-based paintings, the application of a squeegee to efface his marks in many of his abstract works, as well as in the quasi-readymade quality of his works using mirrors and glass. In the artist's most recent mirror work, Acht Grau (Eight Gray, 2002), commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, this withdrawal is pointed, superseded by the spectators' role in shaping both the form and meaning of the work.

Consisting of eight enameled glass panels, Eight Gray addresses themes Richter has been investigating sine the mid-1960s in his monochromes and works in glass. Mounted on steel supports and hanging 50 centimeters from the wall, the enormous panes of Eight Gray exist somewhere between painting, sculpture, and architecture. Installed in relation to the gallery windows-which were uncovered for the installation and replaced with clear glass panels-the opposing rows of colored mirrors produce an endless sequence of reflections of interior and street views, confusing pictorial and actual space. As early as 1967 the artist created a multi-panel glass work, 4 Glasscheiben, which framed the exhibition space within four window-like structures. Hinged at the middle of the support, the clear panels pivoted, changing and reframing the viewer's perspective of the space. For Eight Gray, Richter has once again afforded mobility to the components: each panel can be individually tilted at various angles.

While these two works play off the historical expectation of the painting as window into another world, Richter's related monochromes reject this convention. Making no attempt at illusion, his many gray paintings offer instead a concrete two-dimensional surface, more akin to a wall than a window. For Berlin he has expanded the size of the panels to more truly resemble architectural elements. Richter's choice of gray, the "non-color" he equates with nothingness, further denies the possibilities for association, differentiation, or interpretation. Yet, as Richter has noted, "I know no painting that is not illusionistic....the [Grey Pictures] are the most vigourously illusionistic of all." Eight Gray amplifies this apparent dichotomy. At once opaque and reflective, the work is simultaneously abstract and representational, presenting a monochromatic field as well as a likeness of the viewer and his or her surroundings.

Like his earlier, blurred photo-based paintings, which made reference to half-captured passing moments, the tinted panels of Eight Gray reflect a shadowy, perpetually shifting image. As spectators move in and out of the picture plane, they re-create the random cropping of a snapshot, adding a heightened element of chance. Continuously transforming, the mirrors reproduce the always fleeting moment in front of us and thus remain open, boundless. Though monumental in scale, this series of identical, individual panels surprisingly resists a single coherent vision. Instead Eight Gray presents the multiple possibilities and fractured images that more closely imitate our relationship with the real. Confounding traditional expectations by replacing an image with the viewer's likeness, Richter's mirrored panels emphasize the viewer's individual perceptions, rejecting a predetermined program or collective, unified experience.

Opening hours: daily 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., thursdays to 10 p.m.

Image: Gerhard Richter: Eight Gray, 2002
View of the exhibition hall
Curtesy Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
Photo: Mathias Schormann

on view:
11.10.02-05.01.03 Gerhard Richter: Eight Gray
18.01.03-27.04.03 Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism
10.05.03-06.07.03 Richard Artschwager - Sammlung Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
Unter den Linden 13/15
10117 Berlin
t. +49-30-20209314
f. +49-30-20209320

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