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For nearly 40 years, in a body of work that often looks as though it was made by several different artists, Gerhard Richter has been examining the ways we perceive reality and the effects of different forms of representation on the viewer. "For me," he has said, "there is no difference between a landscape and an abstract painting. In my view, the term 'realism' makes no sense." Richter began painting on photographs in 1989 as a way of conflating sets of opposing values: the tactile paint mark that is actually abstract and the illusionistic depiction of real space created by the action of light on film. The slender volume Gerhard Richter: Florence contains a series of small square snapshots, mostly of the view outside Richter's Cologne studio and street scenes in Florence, which he altered by applying oil paint with a palette knife. In some images, he reinforces the intense color of the photograph (vivid swipes of red and yellow on autumn foliage, for example). In others, the paint nearly obliterates the scene (a milky sheet of paint nearly wiping out a bridge reflected in the Arno River). The artist, who originally conceived the project for a set of CDs (thus the square format), painstakingly subverts normal expectations. The numerical dates that serve as titles are unrelated to the dates when the photographs were taken or painted. Even the size of the reproductions is ever-so-slightly larger (rather than smaller) than the originals. But the visual pleasure of the images doesn't rely on any theoretical underpinning. The rhythmic blotting out of chunks of a view with bands of high-key color creates an abstract beauty all the more jewel-like for being rendered in miniature. --Cathy Curtis
Book Description
Overpainted photographs have been an important part of Gerhard Richter's oeuvre since 1989. Despite their modest size, these works are central to Richter's art, as they occupy, more than any other body of work, a midway point between representational depiction and autonomous painting. Between November 1999 and March 2000 Richter produced 100 overpainted photographs, mostly from pictures taken by the artist in Florence, Italy. With their various and recurring motifs, and the combination of illusory landscape and solid materiality of the paint, this series has the overtones of a musical composition, and in fact, Richter first imagined these works as a compact disc. This book presents the entire series for the first time, and reconstructs the original concept of the work.
Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany. Since the early 1960s he has emerged as one of the essential painters of the postwar period, pioneering Photorealism with paintings made from found photographs (amateur photographs, advertisements and book and magazine illustrations) and then from his own photographs. His work has also profoundly engaged with and influenced such genres as Pop Art and Abstract art. The Museum of Modern Art will present a retrospective exhibition of his work in 2002.
Essay by Dietmar Elger.
100 color.
9 x 9 in.
