Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in East Germany on the 9 February 1932 but escaped to the west in 1961 just before the berlin wall was built. He refers to himself as a visual artist. “Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. His art follows the examples of Picasso and Jean Arp in undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.” tate
Richter has said;
“I would like to try to understand what is, we know very little and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.” Moorhouse(2009)p15
In 1962 Richter incorporated a copy of a photograph of Brigitte Bardot in one of his paintings and has been using photographs, film, magazines, newspapers and advertisements as source material ever since.
“photography has provided an immediate and readily available mine of images, which he has plundered in a completely open and all-embracing spirit. Inevitably, therefore, portraits have been a rich vein (in his work).” Moorhouse(2009)p19
“The tangible sense of each images photographic origins is persuasive[…] the boundries between conventional, named portraits and representations of unnamed subjects are dissolved. Rather it is the inscrutability of these images, their refusal to convey meaning or specific information about their subjects, which confounds understanding according to conventional ideas surrounding portraiture.” Moorhouse(2009)p16
While at art school in Dresden Richter head been schooled in Socialist Realism after moving away from Dresden he encountered Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism which he toyed with but found unfulfilling and reached something of an impasse. He said at the time “I’ve had enough of bloody painting.” Moorhouse(2009)p32
But, as mentioned earlier, painting is Richter’s way of trying to understand the world he lives in, it is his means of communication. He had to find a way forward within painting and the use of pre-existing images as subject matter provided this a way of doing this. Richter cottoned onto Snapshot Painting quite early.
Paul Moorhouse (2009). Gerhard Richter Portraits. London: National Portrait Gallery Publications. p15 et al.
tate. (2010). Gerhard Richter born1932. Available: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gerhard-richter-1841. Last accessed 12th April 2017.
