A visit to Richter

Ema (Nude on a Staircase) Ema (Akt auf einer Treppel) 1966

Last week I visited the Tate Modern… I was having one of those days when things just don’t feel right… and when things don’t feel good, I find the best thing to do is to go to a gallery and visit your friends… Degas, Pollock, Picasso and on this particular day… Richter.

Gerhard Richter is an amazing artist, compelling, distinct and at times beautifully contradictory. His diversity as an artist is almost incomparable to that of his contemporaries. He has the ability to produce works, which are gestural yet mechanic, ordered yet expressive. He is an artist that can place multicoloured abstraction alongside monochrome figurative work. He explores perspective and tests the capacity of vision.

My favourites are Richter’s photo paintings. In the 1960’s Richter began to emphasise the materiality of paint by dragging a squeegee or brush across a freshly painted surface to blur the figuration into semi abstraction. By doing this he was also highlighting a photographs ability to capture movement.   

Gerhard Richter Panorama is on at the Tate Modern from the 6^th Oct 2011 – 8^th Jan 2012 – Do check it out, absolutely stunning.