Page 123 - B-ALL 54 ENG

From the very beginning, Richter established himself as a painter who
rejected established rules.
He paints from photographs, which he transposes onto canvas with a deliberate
blur, blurring the contours of reality and revealing not the subject itself, but the
distance between the image and our perception.
Blur, an essential signature of his pictorial vocabulary, is never a simple aesthetic
effect; it acts as a veil, a resistance, a questioning of the possibility of faithfully
representing reality.
Among these canvases, some have become iconic, such as «Onkel Rudi» (1965),
a portrait of an uncle in Nazi uniform, where the fixed smile dissolves into an
uncertain pictorial material, or «Aunt Marianne,» where the tenderness of a
family scene is tinged with historical tragedy.
The following decade saw the birth of emblematic cycles such as «48 Portraits»
(1972), a series of busts of illustrious men reproduced in black and white, ins-
talled at the Venice Biennale like a gallery of frozen and silent authorities.
Through this work, Richter plays with the museum and academic legacy, while
revealing the fragility of these authoritative images. In his «Color Charts» and
«Grey Paintings,» he conversely explores the extreme neutrality of canvases wi-
thout apparent subject matter, which question painting as a pure colored sur-
face. In the 1980s, he alternated intimate landscapes and portraits with vast
abstractions, worked with a squeegee. Successive layers of paint overlap, crush,
and tear away, producing effects of depth and controlled chaos. Works like
«Betty» (1988), a portrait of his daughter from behind in a floral dress, embody
a peak of this dialogue between intimacy and distance.
The child’s face is denied us, and it is precisely in this denial that the intensity
of the image lies.
Gerhard Richter, Carrot (Möhre), 1984 (CR 558-2)
Oil on canvas, 200 x 160 cm Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
© Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025) |