- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
- London
The exhibition that is a blur between painting and sculpture, figurative and abstract is more importantly a stimulating and thought-provoking retrospective to one of the world’s top living artists and greatest living painter.
This year, Tate Modern exhibits a retrospective to Gerhard Richter, an imaginative and ever influential painter, sculptor, printmaker and installation artist, whose work has re-evaluated the means in which other cultural practitioners have inspired discussion about a contemporary context within their work.
Although the gallery space is filled with a majority of grey scale paintings by Richter, the exhibition is full of life as the subjects of the paintings, though some dark and haunting are in the bulk as energetic as the later multitude of colourful and pulsating abstract paintings. An example forms in the comparison of a piece such as Aunt Marianne 1965; an excellent testament of Richter’s detailed, photographic style; coupled with an Abstract Painting, 1995, which represented a significant change in technique and methodology for the artist, working to his synonymous themes of chance and randomness.
There is a definite beauty to Richter’s progressive subject models, from the personal yet distant family members executed in painterly precision as found in Aunt Marianne or Uncle Rudi, 1965, and a contemporary Old Master romanticism located in Richter’s Cloud series and Annunciation After Titian, 1973. Another of Richter’s formulaic notions is to reveal the potential qualities of his chosen images (derived from photographs) in the case of his Colour Charts, which verge on the cusp of Pop Art (for criticising the ‘factory working artist’ against the mainstream, consumerist art market) and a scientific postmodernism, as the paintings grow in size of the canvas and the colours grow in numbers, almost replicating DNA strands and a pixelated, abstract image.
But to formulate that this just a retrospective of paintings is a stereotype, something which Richter more or less avoids and hazes, as the artist’s 4 Panes of Glass, 1967, ‘painting’ installation stands as a monument to Richter’s transparency with subject matter, medium and the viewer, always testing the limits of ready-mades against that of art objects, as Duchamp.
Whether testing the gaze as directed by (male) audiences to the female subjects in Richter’s paintings of his daughter Betty or first wife Ema, or examining the extent of belief allocated to a reader’s trust in the media, with the Baader-Meinhof series 1988, Richter is tenacious in questioning art audiences’ previous ideals of painting and sculpture. And that same existential examination of contemporary culture, society and politics has transcended the special, melancholy history of Germany to today’s ever changing, inspirational and unpredictable world.