unhappyreadymade:

Ein sehr langer Text von T.J. Clark über Gerhard Richter und seine Ausstellung in der Tate Modern.

The show is enormous. All a review can hope to do is ask a few leading questions of it, and most of these have been asked before, in a literature that is already overwhelming (and often good). Right from the start of the exhibition, in the two small rooms – they feel appropriately stifling – full of Richter’s mostly monochrome oils done from photographs in the 1960s, two questions occur. First, what is Richter’s immersion in the mostly dreary photographic material for? Second, what does his paintings’ elaborate distancing from the feel of the photographic – the blurring and smearing, the way black and white seem to drift towards a weaker, less inflected, more listless overall grey – end up achieving? What does the artist do to the ‘photographic’ and the ‘painted’, as he receives the categories from the culture at large?
The questions crop up naturally, but this does not mean they are the right ones.

Der Text bleibt immer spannend, weil Clark - wie in dem zitierten Abschnitt - immer wieder zweifelt, und zwar an der Ausstellung, an Richter und vor allem an sich selbst.

bulentyusuf:

This is an amazing show. Every room contains something to inspire and delight:

Richter didn’t so much resuscitate painting as submit it to prolonged interrogation - pulling it up by its lapels and demanding it take stock of itself. He was no less forgiving of himself or his family, painting his Nazi-sympathizing father and ‘Uncle Rudi’ (in full uniform) in the same year as his ‘Aunt Marianne’ (1965), who was sterilised and euthanised for being schizophrenic. Why should we not also scrutinise ourselves a bit more, asks Richter’s strange mirrored and glazed sculptures, which blur and distort pictures and viewers alike. The sense of meanings shifting, swelling and dropping away like waves is just as disorienting as the jumps between Richter’s abstract colour charts and his romantic landscapes. His pure, DayGlo abstracts are twenty-first century Jackson Pollocks, but he also makes beautiful portraits. Go figure.

My favourite is “Reader” from 1994, a photo-realistic portrait of Richter’s wife reading a newspaper, with light and shadow dancing reverentially around her features.

I first saw it about ten years ago at the MOMA in San Francisco (though my memory could be deceiving me). It was strikingly beautiful then, and it’s even more beautiful now.

jasonanthonylimberg:

                                                            Gerhard Richter painting…

decanting-cerebral:

Gerhard Richter, September, oil on canvas, 2005

“The image is at the very edge of being recognizable, at that liminal point where the information it contains could be read any number of ways and the mind must struggle to create a whole, or pictorial Gestalt, out of the diffuse,…

coldflame85:

I’ve always been a bit sceptical when it comes to contemporary art. I’ve come across so much rubbish over the years (the Turner Prize is, unfortunately, one of the best examples) that it’s all gone to support a sad and nostalgic theory of mine: contemporary art is nothing but pretentious nonsense. There have been exceptions, of course, so I’m still trying to keep an open mind - but if something doesn’t catch my eye then I don’t bother and just walk past.

miremagazine:

I held my breath almost the entire length of this video. I love the drama of the editing and the mood that they built in very short time. GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING (2011) by Corinna Belz. His retrospective -Panorama- is up at Tate Modern until January 8th.