Gildors Art Corner

The artists of the month:

Gerhard Richter

From 5 September 2024 to 2 February 2025, an exhibition entitled Hidden Treasures. Works from private collections in the Rhineland. The exhibition features works by Gerhard Richter, one of the best-known, best-loved and most highly-regarded contemporary visual artists. He was born in Dresden in 1932, in the east of Germany, then in the GDR, and moved to West Germany in 1961, settling in Düsseldorf. He now lives in Cologne. Gerhard Richter is considered a discreet and taciturn man. Yet he has given countless interviews over the course of his life. They tell of his love of the banal and his hatred of politicians and conservatives.

His work

In 2012, Richter said: ‘Sometimes I think I shouldn't call myself a painter, but an image-maker. I'm more interested in images than in painting. That's why he doesn't work in just one style or with just one kind of image, but tries to explore all possible forms: figurative, abstract, screened, monochrome or multicoloured... This systematic exploration makes him a fascinating artist.

He paints images of grey curtains, minimalist grid structures, coloured squares bought in paint shops, grey monochromes, mirrored surfaces, spaces of superimposed, garish colours, produced with the squeegee as a painting instrument, which allows the greatest possible distance between the artist and his attacking surface. These are not paintings as self-expression, but commentaries on them.

Richter prefers to keep himself out of the painting business. In the Rhineland, in the 1960s, as new currents such as conceptual art and Fluxus (a provocative movement asserting that there is no difference between art and life) were emerging, abstraction became for Richter a distance from his own inner world, in other words a central achievement of autonomous painting. Alongside the likes of Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg and Blinky Palermo, a new irony and a new ‘coolness’ emerged. In an interview with the newspaper Die Zeit in February 2022, he said: ‘The underlying intention was to ... create art without art from something without art. I realised that by painting a photo, which is tasteless and epigonal, I could communicate something new. I was particularly keen to distance myself from art that served left-wing politics, à la Hans-Peter Alvermann, where you could read what was intended at every step. It was important to me that no content should be discovered in my paintings. Most of the time, I distracted attention from the fact that the photographic models sometimes reproduced disastrous events. It was never a question of political or family content, but of banality... My art has never been critical. Art that is supposedly critical of society may be well-intentioned, but it's not art... Rebellion is contrary to my temperament... I've always had the resigned intuition that we can't do anything, that utopia is pointless, even criminal.”

The commissioners, who wanted to replace a stained-glass window in Cologne Cathedral that had been destroyed during the war, wanted Richter to propose a figurative solution, depicting six modern martyrs. But the artist, who has declared himself to be a non-believer, refused this request and used a model that had been in his collection for over 30 years: he filled the surface of the window with 11,263 coloured squares in 72 different shades and left it to chance, controlled by a computer, to decide on their arrangement! In response to the archbishop's criticisms, he repeatedly declared that “we must ‘affirm the loss of the “centre” as the loss of spirit, attitude and individuality. Being a reaction machine, unstable, indifferent, dependent. Surrendering to objectivity. I've always hated subjectivity.”

But some of his work seems to contradict this ‘non-committal’ stance. He has tackled highly sensitive historical themes, particularly those relating to collective memory and German history. A famous example is the ‘18 October 1977’ series, which deals with the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion - Red Army Faction) and German terrorism.

In 2014 he created an abstract painting entitled Birkenau. In this four-part work, made up of large-format paintings, Richter used as models authentic photographs taken secretly in 1944 by the Sonderkommando of Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

His works are extremely diverse, both figurative and abstract. He has constantly experimented with new artistic approaches, including photography, glasswork and sculpture.

His fame

Richter's works often fetch high prices on the art market, further enhancing his popularity. He is regularly ranked among the most expensive living artists, consolidating his position on the contemporary art scene.

Gerhard Richter is considered one of the most important contemporary artists in the world. He is reputed to be a pioneer who has had a major influence on the development of art. As a result, his works often fetch very high prices, as they are considered to have both cultural and historical value.

For collectors, museum curators and art dealers, his advanced age of 92 means that his works will become rarer, increasing their market value.

A painting by Gerhard Richter has become a symbol of refinement and exclusivity, like famous artists such as Picasso or Warhol.

The combination of Richter's unique artistic importance, the rarity of his works, the demand from collectors and institutions, auction records and the temporal relevance of his themes, all contribute to making his work one of the most expensive in the world.

Our point of view

Gerhard Richter is part of a movement of pictorial research that developed in the 1960s and which tended to put emotions at a distance. Wasn't this a reaction to the events of the Second World War, which led to a paroxysmal explosion of negative emotions?

It is interesting that many of these artists chose to work from photographs. This is the case of the English painter David Hockney (b. 1937), who like Richter has become a world reference and whose stock is the highest of all living visual artists.

The distancing, the attempt at objectivity, the desire to say nothing about oneself gives us a sensation of coldness. It's painting to the fourth degree. If the first degree is the artist's perception of reality, and the second degree is his feeling, he introduces a third by photographing what he or others have perceived, and then deconstructing it.

We got the impression that Richter was afraid of his own emotions, afraid of discovering himself, afraid of being categorised? Was this a way of questioning the tendency in today's world to create an infinite number of sub-categories that group people together on the basis of a common point rather than social status, values, ideas, a conception of the world, a culture? Or a fear of not being unique?

As well as introducing us to a world-famous artist who is little known in France, this exhibition has the merit of raising questions about the status of emotions in art.

Peter Winz & Joseph Kastersztein