Gerhard Richter, Time, Memory – World – Arte.it

World – after Jean-Michel Basquiat” Joan Mitchell” Mark Rothko one David Hockney (whose exhibition is still underway in Paris until 1 September), the Louis Vuitton Foundation opens its spaces to a large retrospective dedicated to Gerhard Richter With more than 270 works from museums and international collections that strive to tell for sixty years of career about what is considered one of the most important living artists of contemporary art.

In the intentions of the curators – Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota – The Paris assessment will not be limited to offering a synthesis of Richter’s work, but will improve the multiple directionsStylistic fractures and radical reflection on the status of painting in the contemporary era.

Born in Dresden in 1932, formed in East Germany and fled to Düsseldorf in 1961 just before the Berlin Wall was founded, Judge has developed a personal language that has crossed the traditional categories of Western painting and in many cases has been formulated. From the early sixties, with a series of cloths based on domestic photos, news or advertising images, the artist has introduced a method of pictorial transposition that is able to return the ambiguous and unstable character of modern vision. Works as Uncle Rudi O EMA (naked on a staircase)Made by the blurry filter of the brush, argues a interrogation of both photographic realism and avant -garde -painting. In the same years, Richter is also opposed to i Color chartschromatic tables inspired by the industrial samplers, and the Gray paintingsMonochrome canvases that emphasize neutrality and emotional distance, anticipate many of the subsequent developments of conceptual art.

Gerard Richter, Portrait helmut vowel (Dettaglio), 1965. Kunstmuseum Bochum – © Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung

The retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Fondation is divided into ten chronological sections, each corresponding to a decade or a significant turning point. In addition to the figurative works of the sixties, the series is exhibited Dash In which the images are removed with spatula recordings and abstract works that gradually occupy a central space in his practice.

Under this, the big Abstract photo Made between the 1980s and two thousand represent one of the leaders of his research: Stratified compositions obtained with a long process of drawing up and wearing color, which transform painting into a field of unpredictable forces, almost autonomously compared to the will of the author. A whole room is devoted to the series October 18, 1977made in 1988, which is confronted with one of the most controversial moments of recent German history: the suicide in the prison of the members of the Red Army Group. In these paintings in black and white, Richter reproduces and fades images that have been taken from judicial photos, obtaining a suspension and ambiguity effect that challenges every definitive story of the events. The cycle, exhibited for the first time in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is now considered one of the most powerful works about the relationship between image, trauma and collective memory.

In the Parisian exhibition route, the works on glass, such as the transparent and reflective plates of the nineties and two thousand, and the large installations such as comics, consisting of digital series of color from segmentations of previous abstract works, also find space. The last rooms collect the most recent works, including the series Birkenau (2014), dedicated to the illegal photos taken in the Auschwitz destruction field, which Richter reproduces and then almost completely canceled with abstract backgrounds. It is an extreme point of his reflection on the display of pain, about the need to confront the history and limits of the image as a form of witness.

The route ends with a section dedicated to Cologne Cathedral -windowMade by Richter in 2007: a monumental window consisting of more than eleven thousand colored glass panels, arranged in any order. This public intervention, installed in the Gothic Cathedral of Cologne, represents one of his most symbolic works, in which abstraction, spirituality and randomness go together in a single visual device.

Due to the Paris retrospective, the Louis Vuitton Fondation confirms its dedication in the improvement of the great masters of the second half of the twentieth century and offers an exhibition project that wants to overcome the simple celebration and in its intentions invitations with an active confrontation with one of the most complex and influential study of contemporary.

Richter has never been defined by a single style, nor by a single medium. His work escapes the labels, oscillates between control and disorder, visible and invisible, memory and cancellation. In an era that is dominated by the digital image, his work continues to ask us about the meaning of representation, the persistence of the reality and responsibility of the artist in the face of history.
Gerhard Richter, Birkenau2014, oil on canvas, detail © Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung | Courtesy State Museums in Berlin