ART-PRESENTATION: Gerhard Richter-Paintings and Drawings
Gerhard Richter is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. During a career spanning almost fifty years, the astonishing range of his work has become a defining characteristic, with painting at the centre of his development. Within that medium his scope and output have been prodigious and as a result Richter is seen by many as the greatest living painter.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive
Gerhard Richter has explored painting through a rich and diverse range of ideas that has spanned realist works based on found images and photographs, abstractions made with a squeegee, two and three dimensional glass works, abstract drawings, and overpainted photographs made from images of daily life. In the exhibition “Paintings and Drawings” at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, the artist presents works spanning five years, including: a new cycle of “Abstraktes Bild” a new group of abstract drawings (2015), works from the “Aladin” cycle of paintings under glass and new overpainted photographs. Between December 2014 and May 2015, Richter produced the series “938-941, Abstraktes Bild” on view in the exhibition. These works demonstrate the most recent focus of Richter’s commitment to abstract painting based on the visual historical system for which he has become known, achieved through the build up of painted layers, separated by intervals of time, in which the paint is first applied, then scraped away and added to. These richly chromatic and textured works have an antecedent in a long line of abstract works which have constituted the largest part of his oeuvre. Arrived at through various techniques over the years, since the late eighties he has utilized the squeegee to render compositions based on a hybrid exploration of choice and restraint, control and chance, expressive gesture and mechanical execution, painting as an act and as accident. The “Aladin” works (2010) represent a series from the broader three year period (2010-2013) of paint on glass works. In these, lacquer paint is poured and then manipulated by the artist through its flow onto a Plexiglas plate. The overpainted works, which have been intermittently produced since 1986 and here are represented in a group from 2014-15, begin from Richter’s own everyday photographs and create a nexus between the representational and non-representational that have always marked his work. These small format works permit an intimate space and autobiographical element in his work, allowing for random gestures in an artist otherwise known for meticulously built up layers in the larger painted works.
Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, New York, Duration: 7/5-25/6/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://mariangoodman.com
