ART-PRESENTATION: Gerhard Richter-Seascapes

Over the course of three decades, Gerhard Richter. created seascapes in different formats, colors, and styles: from abstract seascapes in which the horizon can barely be made out to those in which the photographic realism of the sky is only nuanced by an ambiguous light. Shrouded in clouds or totally still, his skies occupy much of the canvas in his seascapes and are only occasionally eclipsed by the sea.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Archive

The exhibition “Gerhard Richter. Seascapes” at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a unique chance to view the largest set of his celebrated seascapes ever assembled to date. In 1965, he made a small landscape in gray tones merging figuration and abstraction, in what we can perhaps boldly consider his first. The signature grays of Richter’s works, which stayed with him throughout his entire career and which he defined as “absent of opinion” are also present in his first work entitled “Seestück” (1968), included in the exhibition. This is a small oil on canvas with a clearly horizontal format, as if it had gone through the anamorphic lenses of a cinemascope. In it, one glimpses an infinite horizon and tiny eddies of what may be white foam, where the materiality of the paint becomes thicker, revealing the artist’s brushstroke. This is a work which could well depict a desert landscape, but the title tells us we are seeing an ocean, which seems to be enveloped in a diffuse light and an ashen atmosphere. Over these years, Richter presented landscapes in different sizes and formats, colors and styles. In “Seestück (Welle)” (1969) two-thirds of the canvas are covered with a stormy sky in varying shades of gray, with light emerging amidst the clouds as if it were a divine manifestation. This effect, most likely due to the fact that the light in the sky does not correspond to its reflection on the sea, was not intentional on the part of the artist, who views light as yet another element of nature. In some of his seascapes, Richter starts with a collage of two different photographs, one of the sky and the other of the sea, just as the French researcher and photographer Gustave Le Grey did before him in the 19^th Century. Richter seeks to create a perfect image, using a sky and a sea at different times, in an illusory composition in which perspective and light have something that ensnares the viewer. These photomontages are recorded in Atlas , the great encyclopedia archive of images that the artist began to compile in the early 1960s and has continued to expand since then. In “Seestück (Morgenstimmung)” (1969), the light that emanates from the horizon line precludes the utter darkness of the ocean. Also from 1969, but in a square format and larger size, are “Seestück (bewölkt)” and “Seestück (grüngrau, bewölkt)”, two totally different landscapes. Among the works in the exhibition, is “Seestück (grau)” (1969). This is a small painting in which the strong abstract brushstrokes make the specificity of the seascape disappear, transforming the work into a monochromatic gray canvas. The last seascape in Gerhard Richter’s career, “Seestück” (1998) belongs to the Collection of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and it marks the closing of the artist’s analysis of this subject. As Richter himself said, these landscapes help him convey his yearnings. “Though these pictures are motivated by the dream of classical order and a pristine world—by nostalgia, in other words, the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality”. Richter’s seascapes are not mere depictions of nature. On the one hand, they challenge the viewer’s perception by painting in a way that resembles photography. Richter manages to achieve an extraordinarily smooth surface by applying highly diluted pigment, and blurs the image, as happens in some snapshots. On the other hand, Richter embellishes the landscape in his quest for perfection: in some works, the sky and the sea actually come from two different images that he fuses, becoming almost interchangeable and thus leaving the viewer to identify each of them.

Info: Curator: Lucía Agirre, , Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Avenida Abandoibarra 2, Bilbao, Duration: 24/5-9/9/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus