ART CITIES:London-Gerhard Richter
This will be Richter’s first gallery exhibition of this nature in London for nearly two decades consisting of over 40 works, at the Marian Goodman Gallery, housed in a former Victorian factory warehouse measuring 11,000 square feet over two floors. The exhibition consists important bodies of new ‘Strip’, ‘Flow’ and ‘Doppelgrau’ paintings, the show will also include a large glass sculpture and a selection of key earlier pieces that help the viewer to understand his course in the art world.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive
Over the past five years, Richter has been primarily concerned with a series of paintings premised on systematically deconstructing a photograph of his own abstract oil on canvas from 1990. Revisiting an idea he first employed in his late-seventies project “128 Photographs of a Painting”, he divided the work’s surface into two vertical sections, then halved those halves, and so on, he had each work printed to his desired scale, so that we might contemplate what have become remarkable horizontal, rhythmic fields of fine lines, oscillating with vibrations of color, the largest of which stretches over ten meters, as seen on the gallery’s first floor. By tellingly entitling these unique works “Strip” paintings, Richter is referring not to those lines, but both to the miniscule vertical strips they represent of their source and to the sense of physically “stripping’ – taking apart and dismantling” his original painting. On contemplation, Richter’s “Strip” paintings distill the pictorial investigations of a 60-year career into a body of work that is wholly consistent with, and contingent on, everything that has preceded them. As photography once opened new pathways for him in the 1960s, digital technology has now added to the expansive territories of his work. By refuting established categorization, Richter has again been able to exploit one media to deconstruct the possibilities of another, arriving at unchartered and unprecedented new propositions. The result is what differentiates him and gives him a special place in the history of the contemporary art. Another new territory through which Richter has reinvestigated his means of abstract painting, are his “Flow” paintings, a group of which are presented in one of the ground floor rooms of this exhibition. Their title refers to the gestural currents of enamel paint that have been frozen in motion at the moment Richter fixed a pane of glass directly to the surface of a painting in process on the floor – arresting a once fluid image at a precise chosen instance. Richter leaves us instead with a smooth surface that not only distances us from subjective gesture, but also reflects our surroundings and ourselves. If the latter is intrinsic to the experience of his “Flo” paintings, in the four large diptychs Richter has presented in the main ground floor space, reflection has been employed almost entirely in lieu of mark-making in itself, which opens up fundamentally different readings of the monochrome. Each work juxtaposes two different shades of grey paint behind glass, hence their titles, “Doppelgrau”. This series continues Richter’s nearly 50-year engagement with grey monochromes, an enduring fascination explained by his dictum that “Grey is the epitome of non-statement”.
Sculptural as well as pictorial, each diptych is mounted to a support that projects the picture plane forward off the wall towards the viewer, hovering in space. Μade of sheets of glass, which are held to one another at angles and produce the illusion of-scrap, through their many levels of light diffusion that removes the concept of architectural environment, as we know it, since the wall, the shadows and the light create the sensation of swinging. In addition to the new works in the show, Richter has punctuated and augmented the exhibition with a selection of paintings on canvas, glass and photographs made over the last 15 years – including his ‘Abstraktes Bild’ and ‘Farben’ paintings – which inform and re-contextualize his more recent pieces.
Info: Marian Goodman Gallary, 5-8 Lower John Street, London W1F 9DY, Duration:14/10-20/12/14, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, www.mariangoodman.com