{ Gerhard Richter }

Most of the art I have heretofore posted has steered away from the overtly abstract. This may be as close as I get. Gerhard Richter is an internationally renowned painter from Germany, though this particular series, "Übermalte Fotografien" (Painted-over Photographs), is apparently lesser-known. Richter's approach to painting is one that embraces “chance, arbitrariness, whim and destruction" as the guiding Vigils in his creation of works that bespeak an "analogy to the ineffable and inconceivable.” And so it seems only fitting that, taking such an approach and with such an end in mind, Richter would explore (in a "meta" sort of way, I guess) that space between photography and painting. I love that in many of his works you can still see the photograph's time stamp, as if to draw attention to the photograph's creation, to the fact that it is a photograph, a creation of a particular sort (if a painting were to have such a marking, would it not be understood as simulating or referencing a photograph?). And then upon these photographs, Richter has applied globs and streaks of paint, again drawing attention to the medium itself, giving it a form that is distinct to that medium. So on the one hand, Richter is not asking the photographs or paint to seem/try to be anything other than what they are; if anything he is celebrating their unique forms of/as artistic expression. On the other hand, he is asking them to share a single space, to bear the possibility of significance and relevance to one another. And so maybe it is in that possibility/tension/conversation that we get a glimpse, however faint, of "the ineffable and inconceivable.”


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