Gerhard Richter Exhibition

Marian Goodman Gallery

This event has ended.

Marian Goodman Gallery New York presents an exhibition of new work by Gerhard Richter.

The exhibition will present new abstract paintings and new drawings from the past three years, as well as a series of ink jet prints from 2012, and overpainted photos from 2008.

The show coincides with a comprehensive survey of the artist’s work at The Met Breuer, New York, Gerhard Richter: Painting After All which will open to the public on 4 March 2020 and be on view through 5 July 2020.

The current exhibition marks the return to abstract painting that has been at the core of Gerhard Richter’s practice since he returned to the brush and squeegee in 2014, following a period of exploration from 2008 forward of digital technologies applied to painting in the Strips — and chance techniques in the poured lacquer Reverse Glass works. Richter’s return to painting at this juncture included an important cycle of abstract works, Birkenau, which utilized abstraction in an inspired confrontation with history, and new landscapes which focused on erasure of the figurative in favor of the abstract.

The new series of abstract works on view continue the trajectory reintroduced five years ago. The new paintings from 2016 to 2018 are mostly drawn from the Gerhard Richter Foundation and have been featured in important recent museum exhibitions of Richter’s work, such as Gerhard Richter: New Paintings at The Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Albertinium, Dresden in 2017, and Gerhard Richter: Abstraction at Museum Barberini, Potsdam in 2018.

The abstract works 944-954 are marked by Richter’s hybrid approach of control and chance, precision and expression, with rich-hued compositions that contain a dynamic fabric of chromatic and material strata. Through tiered layers of color, built up through intervals of time and in breaches in that structure — through layers, blurs, and scrapes — the rhythm of choice and accident in Richter’s practice is on view in the North and South Gallery. The spaces of these works are simultaneously open and equivalent or in some cases more structured, bisected by vertical or horizontal movements. Some maintain a consistent all-over abstract pattern, and others reveal in their interstices a central sweep of comprehensive and pervading darkness beneath. Still others are charged with intense complementary colors that challenge each other on the canvas.

Grauwald, 2008, a series of ten overpainted photos in the South Gallery explores the intersection of grisaille and landscape. These works began as a series of photos taken by Richter in a forest near his home and are a distinct group within Richter’s practice of making daily photographs and then overpainting them. Here the verdant images are veiled with grey lacquer.

954-1 Grey Mirror, 2018, refers to principles that have equally guided Richter’s work since he first used glass in 1967. Using the material as a medium and subject matter, the glass works conceive of painting as a transparent window onto the world or as a mirror reflecting it, asserting the work’s independent value from images. Whether a partition between reality and illusion; a generator of images through transparency and reflection; or as an avatar of grey monochrome, the glass works provide alternate means to explore truth in painting.

Adjacent to Grauwald is a series of six works on paper from 2018-19, which are among the most recent drawings by Richter. Often conceived of independently and at various intervals from the paintings, the abstract drawings seem to exist outside of representation. In these works, articulated planes and zones of geometric space intersect with both architectural and free-form graphic lines, frottage, erasure, and color.

Nearby, Elbe, 2012 consists of thirty-one ink jet prints installed along the South Wall. Derived from the original monotypes by the same title that Richter made in 1957 while a student at The Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, they represent the earliest recognized works from this period of his oeuvre. Rediscovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, they represent early transitions in Richter’s work between traditional landscape and abstract space, and are reminders as Dieter Schwartz says, that “Richter’s work is deeply figurative, always longing for a figure to appear in an abstract work.”

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, where he lived until 1961, studying first at the Kunstakademie, Dresden from 1951-1956, and then at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, from 1961-1963.

He has been the recipient of numerous distinguished awards, including the Staatspreis of the State Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, in 2000; the Praemium Imperiale Award, Japan, 1997; the Golden Lion of the 47th Biennale, Venice, 1997; the Kaiserring Prize der Stadt Goslar, Germany, 1988; and the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna, 1985.

The first survey of Richter’s work to take place in the US in nearly twenty years, Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, will open at the Met Breuer in New York on March 4th and run through July 5th, 2020. The show will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from August 14, 2020 – January 19, 2020. A comprehensive catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Gerhard Richter has been the subject of numerous other important solo exhibitions, most recently at the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2018); the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (2018); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2017); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) Gent, Belgium (2017); Queensland Art Gallery, Brisben, Australia (2017); Espace Louis Vuitton, Beijing, China (2017); Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany (2016); the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany (2015); the Foundation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland (2014); the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2014); and Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany (2013). Since the 1960s he has shown internationally and has had a number of traveling retrospective shows including most recently one which traveled from the Tate Modern, London, to the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011-2012).