ART-PRESENTATION: Gerhard Richter-Cage Paintings
Since the 1960s, Gerhard Richter has immersed himself in a rich and varied exploration of painting. Continually challenging the relevance of the medium. His deliberate lack of commitment to a single stylistic direction has often been read as an attack on the implicit ideologies embedded in the specific histories of painting. Such distaste for aesthetic dogma has been interpreted as a response to his early art training in East Germany.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive
Gerhard Richter presents his “Cage Paintings” series in conjunction a group of abstract drawings Richter made in a single, characteristically intensive working session during the summer of 2020. The series was displayed for the first time at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 in an exhibition curated by Robert Storr entitled “Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense”. “Cage Paintings” (2006) is a group of six large, square abstract paintings, three of the canvases measure 2900 x 2900 mm, while the other three are slightly larger, at 3000 x 3000 mm each. The paintings all have a similar thickly painted surface that is rough and textured in appearance. They are composed of a progression of horizontal and vertical bands and a series of multi-directional scratches and indentations that are scraped into the painted surface. In specific areas of the paintings, the upper layers of paint have been removed and several sublayers of color exposed. In each painting, the layers of colors and the composition of the bands and marks are different. “Cage 1” is predominantly lime green in hue with a wide bottle green bar running horizontally across the upper quarter of the composition, and at the far right of the work is a wide vertical band composed mostly of white, but also containing yellow and green. “Cage 2” is largely pale grey, white and lime green, with small exposed areas of bright red and charcoal grey. “Cage 3” is composed of multiple scratch marks and indentations and is mostly light grey and white, with small patches of lime green, bottle green, dark grey, blue and red. “Cage 4” has multiple sublayers of paint exposed, while “Cage 5” is predominantly grey with white, red, pale yellow and a small amount of black. “Cage 6” is the most varied in its range of exposed underlying colors, but it overall composition is mainly green, white, yellow, black and blue. The paintings are designed to be hung together in one large gallery space. Richter made the “Cage Paintings” in his studio in Cologne in 2006. Art historian and curator Robert Storr has recorded Richter’s process of conceiving and executing the paintings in a detailed photographic and textual account that documents each successive developmental stage (https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/videos/works/cage-paintings-9/?&tab=information-tabs ). In addition to oil paint Richter also regularly used oil of carnation as a retarder to prevent the paint from drying too quickly. According to Storr, this had the effect of creating “striations that suggest motion as well as magnification as if the image were passing by the viewer at high speed like a matrix of vastly enlarged mineral particles miraculously glimpsed in a nuclear accelerator”. The “Cage Paintings” are named after American minimalist and experimental composer John Cage, whom Richter greatly admired and to whose music the artist listened during the period he was making these paintings in 2006. Richter first encountered Cage in the 1960s at a performance given by the composer at the Düsseldorf Academy, where the artist was studying. Cage performed a piece in which he wrote with a microphone attached to a pen so that the scratching sound of the pen moving across the surface of the paper was transmitted. Richter made the abstract drawings that are on show, in a single, characteristically intensive working session during the summer of 2020. The drawings function as autonomous works and have always been an important part of his oeuvre. In the compositions on view, he makes clear use of an eraser to help direct the graphite, emphasizing the self-reflexive nature of drawing, and echoing, perhaps, the subtractive strategy that the creation of “Cage” paintings entails.
Photo: Gerhard Richter, Cage 1, 2006, Oil on canvas, 114 ¼ × 114 ¼ inches / 290 × 290 cm, © Gerhard Richter 2020 (05102020), Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 19/4-26/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-18:00 (by appointment, book here), https://gagosian.com
