Gerhard Richter "Painting 2012"

Marian Goodman Gallery

poster for Gerhard Richter "Painting 2012"

This event has ended.

On view in the exhibition will be Gerhard Richter's "Strip Paintings," 2012 and a recent sculpture, "6 Standing Glass Panels" 2002/2011. In this exhibition, the artist challenges traditional concepts of the medium of painting and continues the dialogue between painting and the glass works which have been a constant in his work since the mid-1960s.

In this exhibition the large scale digital "Strips" reveal a rigorous system whose point of departure is his "Abstract Painting 724-4," 1990, and whose endgame is ultimately his creation of the "Strip Paintings." Using his painting as template Richter achieves, with the help of digital software, a complex system of rules for a new game of chance which imposes on the painting an extreme vertical fracturing of the space. A voluminous limited edition book Patterns* visually documents this digital breakdown of Richter's original painting. From this volume, one can follow the results of Richter's process in action, which focuses on the many sections of the painting. As his plan develops a life of its own, it generates a process of mirroring, repetition and multiplication of ever more reduced sections, until finally a display of more than 4000 patterns are formed, as if the digital process had now assumed the role of sorcerer. The final steps of this journey of chance produce a focused distillation of these patterns into an ever more linear pictorial plane of 8,190 refined striations, but one of inchoate color and rhythmic alignments. It is here at the end of this digital process that the artist can choose to impose his will on these dissonant relationships, this raw material, in order to create from all this, his richly harmonious Strip Paintings. Each of the Strip Paintings is a unique work. As Richter has said, "Chance is a given, unpredictable, chaotic, the basis. And we try to control that by intervening, giving form to chance, putting it to use." (from an interview between Gerhard Richter and Nicolas Serota, Spring 2011, published in Gerhard Richter: Panorama: A Retrospective, 2011, The Tate, London, p. 27).

The sculpture "6 Standing Glass Panels", 2002/2011 (CR:879-4), is made of 6 parallel glass panels assembled in a steel structure. Gerhard Richter first used glass in 1967 in "4 Panes of Glass." This material has become important in his work and, since 2002, the artist has created a series of three dimensional glass constructions, similar to the one presented at the gallery. These works refer to the idea of painting as a window onto the world, or as a mirror reflecting all that is in front. These two aspects appear metaphorically and visually in "6 Standing Glass Panels." By reflecting both the space of the gallery and the visitors the work oscillates between architecture and painting.

Media

Schedule

from September 13, 2012 to October 13, 2012

Opening Reception on 2012-09-12 from 18:00 to 20:00
The artist will be in attendance.

Artist(s)

Gerhard Richter

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