Gerhard Richter : photographs

Le livre

Ausstellung in der Galerie Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf vom 18. Januar bis 17. Februar 2024Deutsch/englische Ausgabe. Mit einem Text von Dieter SchwarzZum 92. Geburtstag des Künstlers am 9. Februar 2024Gerhard Richter: Photographs is dedicated to the artists photographic work and brings together unique photographic prints and rare photo editions. The exhibition and catalogue include early self-portraits, portrait series, landscapes, experimental abstractions, and reproductions of Richters own paintings from 1965 to 2021, demonstrating how Richter continually explored the pictorial potential of photography throughout his decades-long career.Having used photography as a conceptual tool early on and created blurred paintings based on photographic images, he also blurred existing photographs, thus imitating his own painterly effect while bypassing the act of painting itself. The remarkably large-format Mao, for example, is a photographic portrait from 1970, a blurred reproduction of a photographic portrait from another source. With the same interest in the superimposition of representational planes, Richter began photographing his own paintings early on, considering these reproductions as entirely new works. The exhibition features photographic editions of some of Richters iconic paintings, such as Uncle Rudi, Ema, and Mustang Squadron, as well as a unique photograph of his 1992 painting Flowers. Throughout his career, Richter also used the camera as a tool for visual experimentation. Examples of this can be found, among other places, in his experimental self-portraits from 1968. The group of multiple-exposure portraits that Richter photographed of the artist duo Gilbert & George in 1975, some of which he later executed as oil paintings, also exudes a playful immediacy. Dieter Schwarz, the former director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, wrote the introductory essay.