Bow art
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| © gerhard richter 2012 Gerhard Richter, 'Betty', 1988, huile sur toile, 102x72cm Saint-Louis Art Museum Gerhard Richter 2012 |
“He established himself at the other end of the gondola and lay down, facing me, with his head on his own miserably small pack and said nothing”. This is an excerpt from the novel The dharma bums written by Jack Kerouac in the fifties, and it goes perfectly well with the feeling I have in front the artistic work of Gerhard Richter. I can imagine him perfectly well going once and again to the other end of our social gondola, sitting right there on his own creative process and saying nothing, even if he falls down, just letting us alone in front reality and all the questions he creates around it. There’s no answer without a question, no success without mistakes, no life without falling down, no art without a wondering, and no wondering without passion or without fear, the two sides of the same coin.
The bow of Gerhard Richter’s art comes from a continuous rebirth. The German artist says he has no intention, no program and no style or trend to follow. From abstract conceptions to photorealistic works, Gerhard Richter has become one of the major figures in the game of the current artistic bow. His exhibition Panorama presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Modern in London, is a walk along that creative path still alive. Five decades of social reflection, from the terror of the National Socialism to the work September 2005, a painting of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001. And five decades on artistic research, from the paintings created from black and white photographs, from portraits like in Helga (1965) as well as from panoramic aerial views like in Cityscape Madrid (1968), to the blur paintings like Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) (1966) and his famous Autoportrait from 1996.
I confess my fascination for this trip from the realistic to the abstract, like the Tante Marianne extracted from the normal perception and taken to a new level in which individual existence and the way people perceive it can be saw in many different ways and everyone of them brings us new questions and even clearer answers. In the end, when one sees his Kerzel / Candle (1982) and wonders about existence takes conscience of its ephemeral condition, the Schädel / Skull (1983) is our common end, but Gerhard Richter is able to give us a more timeless feeling, a squeegee on the normal conception of time, the idea of the equivalence of material and energy and its eternal transformation. Reality is abstract.
Gerhard Richter | The Metropolitan Collection. A selection here
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Work Betty by Gerhard Richter. © gerhard richter 2012
Image courtesy of Centre Pompidou, Paris
All rights reserved
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Work Betty by Gerhard Richter. © gerhard richter 2012
Image courtesy of Centre Pompidou, Paris
All rights reserved