Gerhard Richter: Panorama
October 6 - January 8, 2012
Tate Modern Gallery - Admission Charge
The following is an excerpt from an essay that I wrote years ago: it is no coincidence that glass became the definitive component of twentieth-century building. Glass reflects; a metaphor of the supposed confidence of twentieth-century man and woman, narcissistic people that seek their own reflections when they are out and about.
The omission in my argument was that I did not play enough with the word “narcissistic”. At the time, I saw it as a desirable quality. Gerhard Richter has definite ideas on the use of glass in buildings, these being embodied in installations like 11 Panes, (2004), and 6 Panes of Glass in a Rack (2002-11), that is, that glass is a distorting surface.
In the same exhibition Gerhard Richter: Panorama currently at Tate Modern, we see the painting Silicate (2003), based on the microscopic images of particles of silicon magnified many thousands of times and painted on a monumental canvas. Materials that reflect, distort and make us seem what we are not could be a theme for the exhibition, except that it is not a themed exhibition but an “ambitious retrospective” (curator, Mark Godfrey) of the work of the eighty year-old artist.
Right from the beginning, Richter takes us where we may not want to go. Dead (1963) is based on the actual photo of a man who had been killed. Richter’s family series, Uncle Rudi (2000), Aunt Marianne (1965), Horst with Dog (1965) and Mr Heyde (1965), all based on family photos, is particularly poignant. His uncle died in the war, and his mentally-ill aunt died in a Nazi eugenics programme. The images are blurred, a metaphor of the distorting dimension of time, and a reference to the artist’s reluctance to resurrect Germany’s grim past. The series is also an illusion to the connection between the Nazis and the ideal of the family.
Richter worked from photographs; his own photos, other family photos, and those he saw in newspapers and magazines. In the gallery Art after Duchamp, we see the paintings Ema (Nude on a Staircase) 1966, and Toilet Paper Roll, 1965). These witty images allude to Duchamp’s Nude Descending Staircase, and the famous Fountain, respectively. In this area, we also encounter 192 Colours, his earliest ‘colour’ painting. In Damaged Landscapes, mark Godfrey brushes aside any connection with Richter of German Romanticism, suggesting that the cityscapes refer to the repair of German cities after the war.
Godfrey explains how Richter made many of his images by enlarging microscopic areas of his photographs, and making paintings of the results – often to result in a ‘scape’ that seems familiar. It is here that images like colours (1974) fall into the perspective of all of Richter’s work. I have seen it reduced in size, and printed in a magazine. It resembles the scramble of colour we see when a digital transmission runs amok – prescient in Richter since he made it before the dawn of the digital age. It is a distortion, and makes us wonder about other ways in which might distort what we see; distorting insignificant matters – celebrity hairdos – so that they seem to matter hugely, and barely reporting on the forces that really do affect our lives – we don’t know what we don’t know.
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| Gerhard Richter Reader 1984 © Gerhard Richter San Francisco museum of Modern Art |
In Exploring Abstraction, Mirror (1981)
reflects exuberantly coloured abstract paintings like Flowers (1977), so
that we can see ourselves in relation to the works, and create a new ‘image’
each time someone different looks into Mirror. Landscapes and Portraits
includes Barn, 1984, the beautiful, colour painting of a ‘real’ landscape, and Betty,
1988, Richter’s famous anti-portrait of his daughter. She had her back turned
to the artist when he took the photo on which the painting is based. From
there, the exhibition continues, veering between the sombre 18 October 1977,
a gallery devoted to the events surrounding the deaths of the main members of
the Baader-Meinhof group, and the uplifting Abstraction in the 1990s.
The former includes a series of images entitled Dead, based on photos of
the dead Ulrike Meinhof. The latter includes a group of enthrallingly lovely
abstract paintings. Also on view is the painting Reader, (1994), based
on Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letterat an Open Window. Questioning
Painting is a collection exploring Richter’s reversal of his own technique;
that is, the photographs in this area are made of his own paintings rather than
paintings of his and other photographs. 2001 and Beyond includes his
response to the events in New York of September 11, 2001, when the plane he was
flying over the US had to be diverted. Richter worked upon the paintings in Cage
as he listened to the music of John Cage. The exhibition is extensive, spilling
over onto the concourse as 48 Portraits and Stroke, and that is the only
criticism that I have, that there is too much material to absorb in one visit.
But such is the nature of retrospectives. This is a must for all followers of
Richter, and is open until January 8, 2012.
Mary Phelan, 2011