March 2002 - Nr. 3
Gerhard Richter Retrospective Opens in New York
TWIG - One of Germany’s most influential and elusive painters turned 70 Saturday (February 9), and New York’s Museum of Modern Art is celebrating with the most sweeping retrospective of the artist’s work ever to be presented in the United States. Starting this week, Gerhard Richter will be the focus of a wide-ranging survey at MoMA, featuring more than 180 pieces from the artist’s diverse and idiosyncratic oeuvre.
"You can’t paint like I do," Richter has said of his work, "because the basic premise is missing: the certainty about what to paint, that is, the ‘subject.’" Many of Richter’s paintings take their inspiration from the media and photography: family snapshots, aerial photos, and newspaper clippings. Some suggest religious symbolism. Others are abstract - they can be vivid and painterly, or gray and melancholy. Unlike artists whose development follows a clear trajectory, Richter moves from one style to another erratically. "I don’t like to talk about theories, because I don’t have any," he says. "When one has had enough of a thing, then one must do something else - it’s just a feeling."
Richter was born in Dresden and began his career painting murals, one of the few art forms that allowed East Germans to abandon the rigid rules of socialist realism, since the government defined it as "decorative." But it was only on traveling to the West and seeing the work of contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana that Richter grasped the vast possibilities experimentation could bring. Richter left the GDR in 1961, just before construction of the Berlin Wall began. As a student at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, he discovered abstract expressionism, neo-dada, fluxus and other avant-garde movements, then set off in a direction all his own.
One of Richter’s most controversial works, 18. Oktober 1977, addresses the fate of the leftist Baader-Meinhof group and has drawn intense criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Yet MoMA curator Robert Storr believes his real strength lies in exploring the nature and limits of painting itself. "It is a medium that has come to depend for its survival on Richter’s severe scrutiny," says Storr, "and has survived and thrived in large measure because of it."
"Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting" runs from February 14 through May 21 at MoMA. The exhibit will then travel to the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
