Gerhard Richter, the subversive anachronism

Berlin,

Six decades ago, after moving from East to West Germany in 1961, Gerhard Richter was taking his first steps in questioning to what extent it was possible to make art after Nazism and the Holocaust, issues that, in fact, he has not stopped addressing to this day. He preferred to destroy some of his early canvases, sometimes titled Execution either Hitler (1962), pieces that would be followed, in the middle of that decade and with better material fortune, Aunt Marianne, Uncle Rudi either Mr. Heydewhich were based on previous photographs and alluded to both the German past and his family history. In parallel, he would begin to collect historical visual testimonies, sometimes private, such as photographs, newspaper clippings and sketches, in what he called his Atlasfrom which he has continued to draw sources until now; this archive again includes images of concentration camps that he tried to use as pictorial motifs for the first time in the 1990s, but then abandoned the idea.

For this reason, the project he carried out in 1999 for the entrance hall of the Reichstag has a powerful symbolic meaning: Black, Red, Golda work made of enamelled glass plates that he wished to be interpreted as a new beginning for his country. A small-format version of it, conceived for the Bundestag, is part of the presentation “Gerhard Richter, 100 Works for Berlin”, which can be seen at the Neue Nationalgalerie until September 2026 and which closes a circle in the very close ties between the creator and Germany: these hundred works have been deposited in the centre, on permanent loan, by the Gerhard Richter Art Foundation; a selection of them is now on display at the express wish of the artist and, in the future, all of them will be used to articulate curatorial or artistic interventions in changing contexts. The aforementioned adaptation of Black, Red, Gold We can see it together with two other specular works, some photographic editions of that one Atlas and the painting Skull (1983), which offers the blurred appearance of a still-fresh oil painting, a technique and results that for Richter represent the possibility of avoiding the direct and literal representation of a snapshot on canvas. This concern, at its core, can also be found in his abstractions: frontal rejections of the presentation of identifiable motifs – at their end, not at their beginning – that he has been developing since 1976, normally with intense tones and in several layers. He usually applies the pigments with a rubber brush, an instrument that he also uses to mix them and to partially scrape the support.

The layers of colour open up and the lower surfaces become transparent, giving the resulting composition a deep structure in which chance and precision seem to come together, making the creative process visible. We will also appreciate these ways of doing things in monumental works such as Strip (2013-2016) or 4900 Colours (2007), the latter consisting of almost two hundred individual panels, each divided into twenty-five colour squares: like Albers, he too had been investigating colour fields based on this geometric form since the mid-1960s, when he became fascinated, almost obsessed, by industrially produced colour sample cards, with their smooth perfection and precision in reproducing tones and their possibilities for variation. For Richter, these squares evoked exactly the opposite of emotional emphasis, expressiveness or the sublime – that is, the properties that, until the first decades of the twentieth century, had been considered characteristic of painting.

Gerhard Richter. 100 works for Berlin. Neue Nationalgalerie

He would work with strict distributions of the chromatic fields until 1974, but would return to them later in proposals such as these, using the computer to divide the squares into increasingly smaller segments, stretching axes and reordering sections. As a result, we can contemplate combinations of striped motifs apparently found at random and arranged capriciously by the author. Both creations represented an almost radical evolution of his abstract production, an exploration of the possibilities and limits of painting that he would repeat, along very different paths, in 2014, in the series Birkenau.

In this case, his starting point was four photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp itself, taken secretly in August 1944 by Jewish prisoners who risked their lives in taking them. They show both the grounds of the camp and the interior of the fifth crematorium, with numerous corpses, and are the only surviving images of these extermination spaces from the victims. They were not published until after World War II, and by 1967 Richter had already included several of them in his Atlasbut it would not be until the appearance of several of them in the essay by Georges Didi-Huberman Images despite everything (2008), in which the philosopher used them to analyse how the Holocaust could be represented, when Richter felt the impulse to use them in his work. He transferred the four scenes with charcoal and oil paint to individual canvases and then painted over them from abstract parameters, so that with each added layer the original motifs disappeared until they were no longer visible to the viewer.

The German artist’s aim is for his abstract creations to generate moods of melancholy and meditation in those who look at them, especially when he uses black and grey colours. By not excluding the figurative at first, they also debate a space between what is shown and what is not shown, opening up avenues for reflection. In the Neue Nationalgalerie, a large four-part grey mirror has been placed in front of this series, recalling that, almost from the beginning, Richter’s paintings were accompanied in their exhibitions by sculptures made of glass and mirrors that allowed him to delve into the boundaries between the natural and the artificially created. The mirrors refer to an external reality and, at the same time, they allow us to evoke the context to which the project alludes. Birkenau and the one to which the viewing public belongs, without losing sight of the notion, also present here, of the canvas as a mirror and as a window.

Ultimately, this series invokes the complexity of an image or representation, addressing essential questions of painting that predate Richter himself and our time. Birkenau and the other pieces in this exhibition underline the tension that persists between abstraction and figuration, between photography and painting, keys whose analysis took to a new level in the series Overpainted Photoswhich began in 1986. These are small-format photographic prints, often measuring 10 x 15 centimetres, which the artist drew from his own personal collection: visits to museums, trips, walks, family photos… Despite their small size, they have played an important role in his career: they embody the connections between abstract painting and the representation of a photographic image like no other of his works; the painted elements erase the image and complete it at the same time.