Gerhard Richter loves Blur
// November 14th, 2011 // View Comments // b-inspired, featured
Painting blur, that is. The epic retrospective of his work at the Tate Modern features Richter’s lifelong love affair with paint, and affinity for its manipulation. Even as Tacita Dean mourns the loss of film, Richter laughs in the face of those who proclaim paint a dead medium. He’s done a lot of interesting politically motivated work on subjects like the Baader-Meinhof group and Germany’s Nazi past. But for me, at least, the variety of his painterly tricks was the best part.
Consider this stunner, Negroes. Richter projected a found photograph of a Sudanese tribe onto canvas in order to perfectly replicate it. He then dragged a dry brush across the wet paint to create a blurred effect, one of his stylistic signatures. Paradoxically, the blur suggests hyper-realistic movement while simultaneously emphasizing the physical nature of paint.
Richter’s very well known for abstract works like this, Abstract Painting. He uses a squeegee to push the paint around the canvas and revealing hidden layers of paint. It’s easy to take a look at this paltry reproduction and proclaim “bah! I could do that.” But when you behold it in its full glory it’s surprisingly affecting. Richter masterfully plays with scale and layering here, so you can’t tell which layers are on top and which are peeking out. You can only create this kind of image using paint, and Richter reminds us that it’s a living, breathing medium.
In Lilies Richter quite literally takes a swipe at cliché. Flowers are a centuries-old symbol of mortality and decay, particularly the traditionally funereal lily. Richter originally painted the flowers with photorealistic precision, but found the resulting image “unbearable,” and blurred it into ghostliness. As a result, the lilies are a more effective memento mori.
A surreal, claustrophobic Seascape. Richter cut the sky out of two photos of the sea before turning one upside down and pasting it above the other. He then painted the photographs in the familiar blurry/crisp style. This is a good example of his contemporary engagements with Europe’s great painting traditions. Seascapes are traditional material for painters, but Richter introduces the more recent technique of collage. Interestingly, although this work dates from 1970, it reminds us of today’s Photoshopped images.
Many reviewers have marvelled at Richter’s range. This small-scale intimate portrait of his wife forms a strong contrast to the big abstract canvases. Reader is a tribute to Vermeer’s iconic painting. Richter depicts light like the Dutch genius but brings the subject into the 20th century by showing her reading a news magazine rather than an enigmatic letter.
I’d love to talk about all the exciting paintings in the exhibition, but we’d be here all day. Go see it, if you can. And if you want a squeegeed abstract piece, brief the Exchange.
