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  • IMAGE CREDIT
    portrait: released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
    banner: portrait Gerhard Richter.

photo paintings

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  • WRITINGS
  • Gerhard Richter
    'Notizen = Notities', in Richter. Werken op papier 1983-1986 (Museum Overholland : Amsterdam 1987) 4-17. A selection of Richter's notes was published for the first time on the occasion of an exhibition at the Museum Overholland, Amsterdam in 1987.
  • Hans Ulrich Obrist (Hrsg.)
    Gerhard Richter, Text, Schriften und Interviews (Insel Verlag : Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig 1993). Also published in English as Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), The daily practice of painting. Writings and interviews 1962-1993 / translated by David Britt (Thames & Hudson/Anthony d'Offay Gallery : London 1995)
  • Dietmar Elger und Hans Ulrich Obrist (Hrsg.)
    Gerhard Richter. Text 1961 bis 2007. Schriften des Gerhard-Richter-Archivs, Band 1 (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König : Köln 2007).
    • In 1993, the first edition of Gerhard Richter's writings (1962-1993) was published, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist. This new complete edition of the writings begins with Richter's farewell letter to his teacher Heinz Lomar of 1961, and is enriched by fifteen unpublished texts from 1962 to 1993. The volume thus comprises the complete texts of the past fourteen highly productive years, and closes with an interview on Richter's contribution to the Venice Biennale 2007. For this publication, Richter for the first time put his complete private archive at the editor's disposal; most of the photographic material is from this archive and has not been published before. An appendix provides ample commentary and sources as well as an index.
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  • BIBLIOGRAPHY
  • DISSERTATIONS/THESES
  • Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
    Gerhard Richter. Painting after the Subject of History (City University of New York 1994).
  • Rosemary Hawker
    Blur. Gerhard Richter and the photographic in painting (University of Queensland 2007).
  • Jeanne Anne Nugent
    Family Album and Shadow Archive. Gerhard Richter's East, West and All German Painting, 1949-1966 (University of Pennsylvania 2005).
  • ARTICLES, ESSAYS and PAPERS
  • Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
    'Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity. Gerhard Richter's Work of Mourning', in October 75 (Winter 1996) 60-82.
  • Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
    'Readymade, Photography, and Painting in the Painting of Gerhard Richter', first published in Daniel Abadie (ed.), Gerhard Richter (Musée National d'Art Moderne : Paris 1977) 11-58. Reprinted in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. An October Book (Cambridge MA etc. 2000) 365-403.
  • Arthur C. Danto
    'History In a Blur', also on Mark Harden's Artchive.
  • Hilde Van Gelder
    'The present-day scholar: an (im)possible representation?', in Image [&] Narative Issue 10. Published March 2005.
  • Rosemary Hawker
    'The Idiom in Photography As the Truth in Painting', in The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, Number 3 (Summer 2002) 541-554.
    • While contemporary German painter Gerhard Richter is known for the diversity of his oeuvre, his so-called photo-paintings evidence a persistent return to the relationship of two traditionally opposed media. Often startling in their visual effects, these images rely on a highly rhetorical attempt to transcribe what I will label "photographic idiom" into the medium of painting. In some of Richter's works, this photographic reference appears as a high realism, one that we take for granted in the veracious medium of photography, yet cannot help but be impressed to find in painting. Richter's paintings, however, have most to say about photography in their oblique reference to the medium. Richter refers not to the visual plenitude and truth that we usually associate with photography, but rather to its moments of representational inadequacy, to photographic blur and lack of focus that results in deliberately obscured imagery. In these works—of which 'Lesende' (1999) is a good example—the space between photography and painting is at once closed and reopened.
  • Detlef Hoffmann
    'Die Schärfe der Unschärfe. Zum Beispiel: »Onkel Rudi« von Gerhard Richter', in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte. Special issue 'Geschichte und bildende Kunst'/ hrsg. von Moshe Zuckermann 34 (2006) 254-268.
  • Getrud Koch
    'The Richter-Scale of Blur', in October No. 62 (Autumn 1992) 133-142.
  • Bente Larsen
    'Gerhard Richter. Interview with Buchloh'.
  • Peter Osborne
    'Painting Negation. Gerhard Richter's Negatives', in October 62 (Autumn 1992) 102-113.
  • Andrew Otwell
    'Gerhard Richter and the Simulacrum' (1997).
  • Andrew Otwell
    'Photography in the Expanded Field. Painting, Performance, and the Neo-Avant-Garde', in Timeline of Art History / Department of Photographs (The Metropolitan Museum of Art : New York 2004).
  • Julian Stallabrass
    'Gerhard Richter. Painting and Mass Media', published on the site of Julian Stallabras, Courtaulds Art Institute, London. Published in Spanish as 'Pintura y medios de comunicación', in Kalías no. 8 (Valencia 1992) 102-108.
  • Lydia Strauß
    ' ', in Inge Stephan, Alexandra Tacke (Hrsg.), Nachbilder des Holocaust (Böhlau Verlag : Köln 2007). Reviewed by Susanne Düwell for hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de.
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  • Gerhard Richter (Dresden 1932) studied at the Kunstakademie in Dresden between 1951 and 1956 before moving to Düsseldorf in 1961. Over the next two years he completed his studies at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie where he was accepted into the class of Ferdinand Macketanz and for two years with K.O. Götz. At the academy, he met artists like Konrad Lueg (later Konrad Fischer), Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo.
  • In 1964, Richter had his first solo-exhibition at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. In 1966, he began to work on Color Charts, exhibited the same year at Galerie Friedrich and Dahlem in Munich. In March, Richter and Polke exhibited together at Galerie h in Hannover, which was by the way the first major presentation of Polke's work. In 1969 Richter reviewed material collected throughout the 1960s and began to assemble pieces for Atlas, an ongoing compilation of photographs, clippings and sketches.
  • In 1971, Richter became professor at Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. In 1978, Richter taught for one semester as visiting professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. In 1983, he moved from Düsseldorf to Cologne.
  • A selection of Richter's notes was published for the first time on the occasion of an exhibition at the Museum Overholland, Amsterdam in 1987. In 1993, his writings were published in German as Gerhard Richter. Texte, edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist. The English version followed in 1995. In 1996, Richter moved to a new home and studio. At the Venice Biennale in 1997, Gerhard Richter was awarded the Golden Lion.
  • Richter is by many considered a "conceptual painter" whose "paintings are statements about ideas for paintings." Richter himself said that he wanted to express "the inadequacy in relation to what is expected of painting" through his art, the inadequacy of the making of images and the critical examination of it. He is considered a master of 'deconstruction' of formal conventions of painting. According to Storr, all of Richter's works point toward "the basic loss of bearings"; he is "an image-struck poet of alertness and restraint, of doubt and daring."
  • Source
    Text based on the MoMA catalogue's 'Chronology', compiled by Catharina Manchanda and on the catalogue essay by Robert Storr.
  • More Information
  •  Gerhard Richter. Includes Timeline.
  •  ifa Künstler-Datenbank
  •  Texts