Customer Reviews

Gerhard Richter: Paintings 2003-2005

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Richter has sought a long and arduous path as an artist. He has never claimed to be a painter's painter, his creativity continually betrays it, instead he takes a concpept, a single colour sometimes often devoting a year's work to "Grey",but all its manifestations, spatialities, and genres; or a technique is exploited as herein, as "squiggee flat" across a surface and sees where it takes him, light does peek thru, but controlled and inhumanized, it's difficult to discover Richter's signature here, or perhaps you can, who else can render these provocative paintings, you sense the power of mechanical industry of commerce, as you see the paint merely manipulated in one direction,inevitably dehumanized; Deleuze might say Richter should exhibit more what is human, perhaps his voice has been stilled, silenced;"squiggee" has an import, a content of the serial,but only to a degree, it has some controlled civilized element of spontanaeity; for once you have one, all you can do is create another, like Rothko, he can only(only did) change- transform the colour, the dimensions,the volumes; the content hovers simultaneously within the same narrow existential spaces, withdrawn crevices of the mind of experience of isolation.But you know the painting the work is complete, that is what is most powerful in Rothko,as in Richter; it is complete,never overdetermined, you then complete the work yourself, interpreting/participaing in what is there or not there; For Richter technique seems to be a focus,very similar to Jasper Johns,who also tried incredible numbers of technique, lithographs,assemblage,combines,serialization for technique forces you out of yourself, are we to find then a kind of false subjectivity, a denial of it, with repetition, such an ugly word in late capitalism, yet the automata of Richter is compelling, devoted to a cause of aesthetic protubrance, I wonder what he thinks he discovers at the end, he simply moves on, but when moving he sticks, he contemplates, he inhabits moments in his creations, so process again is the important factor; we are past the misplaced liberalism, the shibboleths of "my art doesn't express anything", a child's mind created this thought, one confused with the forever opaque-nesses befalling the state of the globe. I like Richter very much, I have followed his art and he is a richly diverse alter-ego to the Joseph Beuys anarcho-aesthic tyranny. You wonder if you are cashing in on yourself the more you venture to the next aesthetic station. . . .