Gerard Richter (after) - STRIP (921-2) / Lo tienes que ver…

objet/gerard richter after strip 921 2 lo tienes que ver GC7frUM 633296199 / Résultats des ventes

objet/gerard richter after strip 921 2 lo tienes que ver GC7frUM 633296199

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objet/gerard richter after strip 921 2 lo tienes que ver GC7frUM 633296199

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Gerard Richter (after) - STRIP (921-2) / Lo tienes que ver…

Gerard Richter Cartel offset (*) Edited for the exhibition “Lo tienes que ver…” at the Juan March Foundation in 2025. Reproduction of STRIP (921-2), a work created by Richter in 2011 and part of the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Published by the Juan March Foundation. Authorized print with copyright. Large Format. *** LAST COPIES *** - Sheet dimensions: 96.7 x 61.5 cm - Year: 2025 - Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited; it has always been kept in a professional art folder, and is therefore in perfect condition). - Provenance: Private collection. The work will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. The shipment will be certified with a tracking number. The shipment will also include transport insurance for the final value of the work with full reimbursement in case of loss or damage, at no cost to the buyer. (*) Gerhard Richter, still actively producing, even past his nineties, dared to oppose Adorno by asserting that even after Auschwitz there is poetry. This author, born in 1932 in Dresden, trained at his Academy of Fine Arts and resident in West Germany since 1961, has essentially centered his production on contemplating to what extent it was possible to make art after Nazism and the Holocaust. He preferred destroying some of his early canvases, sometimes titled Execution or Hitler (1962); pieces that would be followed, in the mid-to-late sixties and with better financial fortune, by Aunt Marianne, Uncle Rudi or Mr. Heyde, which were based on prior photographs and referred both to the German past and to his own family history. In parallel, he began to collect historical visual testimonies, sometimes private, such as photos, newspaper clippings and sketches, in what he called his Atlas, from which he has continued to extract sources to this day; from that archive are, again, images of concentration camps which in the nineties he tried to use as pictorial motifs for the first time, but discarded the idea. Richter understands art as a catalyst for problems and as a problem in itself: he has been interested in the other side of painting, the ability to affirm the meaning of the act of painting only to deny it later and emphasize the distances between painting that represents motifs and that other painting that reflects on itself and not on reality. When he decided to leave East Germany, it was after discovering Fontana and Pollock’s works at the 1958 Kassel Documenta: both gave him a jolt in concluding that his search would have to be based on fighting painting without abandoning it. Under the influence of other European authors (Giacometti and Dubuffet) he began to reproduce photographs in oil and, eager to distance himself from the German tradition, began a path of art that he wanted to be independent, halfway between philosophical skepticism and gravity. Those photographs that fed Richter’s work were at once bitter to him: he thought they withered and led a nomadic and miserable life; also that he could redo them, rescue them. For the German painter the artist should not seek to express the character of his subject, and when he works from a photo, he will not represent an individual, but an image that will have nothing to do with him. The aim of similarity would be useless. Expanding on that idea, painting from a photo would erase conscious thought: the artist does not need to make decisions. There is no notion of originality, the temptation to describe, sentimentalism, thematic or iconographic content… For all this, the public will also have to modify its ways of seeing and thinking: if the canvas no longer imitates, and cannot be interpreted as a document, one must seek in it an unreality in which irony fits. What do his techniques consist of? Richter copies in oil on primed canvas with precision and without intent to add or remove, anonymous photos without aesthetic pretensions or, apparently, emotional value. He neither alters nor distorts the starting images, and his reason precedes his art: I do not need to deform as Bacon does; the objects are already scary enough. The dominant grays in many of his works connect with that zero desire to express opinion; again, returning to his words, gray is more qualified than any other color to represent nothing at all. Yet, breaking with that mechanization, the finding that would be his hallmark emerges: the smudging of the contours that contrasts with the sharpness of classical photography and causes us to encounter, at once, the real image and its dissolution. I do not need to deform as Bacon does; the objects are already quite terrifying. Regarding the selection of the images that nourish his production, Richter does not choose them randomly. One of the most emblematic is the aforementioned Uncle Rudi (1965), his own uncle: apparently a friendly man who wears the Nazi army uniform. The artist dedicated this work to the victims of the SS during the punitive action against the Czechoslovak town of Lidice in 1984; we can therefore understand it as a reflection on acts of commemoration and mourning in his country in the postwar period. Obsession with pain and death also haunted him, as he again demonstrated in Shot 2 (1988), an expression of his despair in the face of the dilemma that our eye allows us to identify things and yet prevents and constrains understanding of reality. In 2014, for the Birkenau series, his starting point were four photos of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, secretly taken in 1944 by Jewish prisoners who risked their lives to take them. They show both the camp grounds and the interior of crematorium V, with numerous corpses, and they are the only preserved images of these extermination spaces that come from the victims. They were not published until after World War II and, in 1967, Richter had already included several of them in his Atlas, but it would not be until the appearance of some in Georges Didi-Huberman’s essay Images Despite All (2008), in which the philosopher used them to analyze how the Holocaust could be represented, that he felt the impulse to incorporate them into his work. He transferred four scenes, with charcoal and oil paint, to individual canvases and then painted on them from abstract parameters, so that with each added layer, the original motifs disappeared until they finally ceased to be visible. We have referred to specific pieces, but to understand Richter’s work we must study it as a whole: his various styles have been simultaneous, and therefore ambiguous. In some and in others he has sought technical mastery, and globally they seem to articulate a grand opera: he has cultivated monochrome and expressionism, hyperrealism and abstraction. Landscape, portrait and still life. His color samples are well known, which challenged a certain decorative quality in European abstraction; they are industrial catalogs that impact what painting can be as a brilliant spectacle and undermine the foundations of styles. The result resembles a fresco of that discipline in the 20th century. Like Josef Albers, he too investigated color fields starting from the geometric form of the square from the mid-1960s, when he was fascinated, almost obsessed, by the color swatches produced industrially, with their soft perfection and precision in reproducing tones and their possibilities of variation. For Richter, those squares evoked the opposite of emotional emphasis, expressiveness, or the sublime, that is, the properties that, up to the early decades of the last century, had been considered inherent to painting.

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