Gerhard Richter Retrospective at Tate Modern



We had the good fortune to see the Gerhard Richter retrospective at The Tate Modern. It was doubly good since we had seen a show of similar scale at MOMA a few years ago. Richter is certainly the most highly regarded painter living today. His work cuts a broad swath, but I don't view it as ground breaking as were many artists from the early and mid-20th century. He is famed for being one of the first German artists to acknowledge and deal with the elephant in the corner, the collective Nazi history. His painting Uncle Rudi brought this home with a bang in 1965. This piece is typical of the period in which Richter did large realistic black and white paintings based on photographs, in which the edges of forms are smudged. This has a haunting effect. By contrast, he did a large body of abstract conceptual work that dealt with monochromatic color, sorry, of little interest to me. He later did a series of realistic paintings based on German terrorist groups, leaving ambiguous commentary to the viewer. In the realistic department, Richter did several color portraits, usually with the subject's face away from the viewer. The Reader is a great example of these insightful works. He is today most well known for large abstract oil paintings made with squeegees, that are...just plain gorgeous. I have watched a person walk into a gallery room, see one of these works, and drop their jaw. Maybe that was me. The internet is chock full of images from all of his periods of work, so give a look next time you are surfing!