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Gerhard Richter
499 Plays8 months ago
In this episode, we dig into Gerhard Richter's lifetime of painting and his incursions in more conceptual works. We visited his first exhibition at David Zwirner, London, where we discovered drawings, paintings, mirror works and much more.
Our research led us to his beginnings in Dresden and Düsseldorf, in post war GDR and Western Germany. What is fascinating is how the photographic image is the guiding light in his relation to trauma, to history, to the present but most of all, to painting. Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Duchamp, all had an impact on Richter who nevertheless built his own path in the always menaced painting genre throughout the end of the century. Indeed, how many times was painting declared dead in the 20th century?! Too many to count.
We kept our relation to Richter's work personal and fluid (Emily even got to do some reading), as there are so many sources out there for further information, amongst which: the catalogue raisonné published in 2022 by Hatjze Cantz; the Richter Interviews published in 2019 by Heni Publishing; and much more, which you can find here: https://gerhard-richter.com/en/literature
Info about the exhibition:
https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2024/gerhard-richter
You can also explore Richter's website:
https://gerhard-richter.com/en/
Music: Sarturn
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Transcript
Introduction & Episode Overview
00:00:10
Speaker
Hi there, thank you for joining us for another episode of The Pod. This time we embark on a journey through painting in all its guises. We explore the work of Gerhard Hichter, who embraced and surpassed in some ways all the pictorial styles known to humans, and who engaged in some conceptual endeavours as well with reflective surfaces.
00:00:34
Speaker
Jorge Luis Borges considered that there is something diabolic about mirrors. Since they multiply the world and, facing each other, they create an endless labyrinth. And I think Richter would agree. But perhaps there is also something redeeming about them? Irreducible? Human? And what about images?
00:00:57
Speaker
Are we talking about the same thing? Well, here we go again. Visiting exhibitions so that you have to, or at least for you to visit them vicariously through us. Because it is such a pleasure to know, feel and imagine more, and to talk about it. So, let's dig in.
00:01:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Exhibitionista's podcast.
Podcast's Mission and Hosts' Introduction
00:01:24
Speaker
We explore the work of an artist through their solo exhibition on this podcast and have a chat about it. So we visit exhibitions so that you have to. We are a big proponent of going out and seeing art as it's exhibited. And we hope that this podcast in some way inspires you to go and engage with art.
00:01:47
Speaker
I'm Emily Harding. I'm an art lover and an exhibition goer. And I am Joanna Pia Nevis, a contemporary art curator and writer. So this is a podcast with two middle-aged women who love going to exhibitions and talking about them.
Focus on Gerhard Richter
00:02:03
Speaker
So for this fifth episode, and I can't believe this is already the fifth episode, we will be focusing on a massive, massive pillar of the 20th century and 21st century in contemporary art, the great artist Gerhard Hichter. But first
Cultural Experiences of the Hosts
00:02:19
Speaker
of all, Emily, how was your week in culture? Did you see, read, or watch any juicy stuff?
00:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I went and saw the Aria Dean exhibition at ICA in London, but we're not going to talk about that now.
00:02:36
Speaker
We're going to talk about that on a future podcast. But it was great, really, really great. Other than that, finished up True Detective Night Country. This is the fourth season of this. I think you watched this too, right? Did you watch this? No, I never watched it. And as soon as I saw that my lady, Jodie Foster, was in it, I was like, OK, I need to hop on this train because I love her.
00:03:01
Speaker
Yeah, she's yeah, she's really, really, I mean, she's always good. She's brilliant in this. And then there's Kelly Reese rice. I'm not entirely sure how you pronounce your last name, but she is a co star in it, one of the main stars with Jodie Foster.
00:03:17
Speaker
And she's a former boxer, former professional boxer. So it's like, she's, yeah, so she's, you know, it's the size differential between the two. I mean, Jodie Foster comes across as a tiny woman. And then, you know, this woman, Kelly is a boxer and looks like a boxer. I mean, she's really, you know, fit and, and, you know, bigger than Jodie Fosse has super strong. Yeah.
00:03:43
Speaker
I love it when people who aren't actors, but are somewhat performers in some ways, move on to film series, cinema. I love that. And when it works, it can be very, very interesting.
00:04:00
Speaker
She's a really powerful actress. I mean, she was really, really great in this role. And this is the first true detective that wasn't written and directed by Nick Pizzolato, I think is his last name, who was the original creator of the first three seasons. It was directed by somebody else, a woman,
00:04:27
Speaker
director, I don't remember her name, but apparently he was really slagging it off. And it was just like, you know, I mean, being really saying, oh, the dialogue is just trite and things like that. And it's like, this is this, I think I'm right in saying this is the most watched true detective since the first one.
00:04:52
Speaker
So it's like she's obviously done something really engaging. And it is. I mean, it has all of those. So True Detective, you know, has these, you know, kind of main pillars and all of them. It's sort of these detectives that are obsessed with their jobs and really driven by their jobs in some way. It usually has like this really wild terrain that they're
00:05:18
Speaker
faced with. So the environment and the landscape are an absolutely huge part of the story. And here it takes place in Alaska up in the Arctic Circle when it's full days of night, the sun is not coming up. But in this one, it also has a big philosophical bent. So there is
00:05:43
Speaker
Peter and I actually rewatched the first one, which I really, really love. I mean, it is a great TV for as bad as Nick Pizzolato is being, you know, badly behaving now. He did make a really good first series of that.
00:05:59
Speaker
But this one I think you know definitely goes toe-to-toe with it in terms of you know kind of that richness and depth and Yeah, and the actors are great. It's a great story. It's a bit gruesome though. I don't know if it would be your
00:06:14
Speaker
I love gruesome stuff. No, I mean, it depends. I like everything. It just has to make sense to me. That's basically, yeah, not gratuitous sort of violence, but, you know, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:06:32
Speaker
Cool. So what about you? Listen, you know, I haven't been feeling, I'm not at my best health wise, as you know, but I still managed to drag myself to the theater to see, uh, poor things. Ah, yeah. Which I was. Did you think? Yeah.
00:06:50
Speaker
I was so underwhelmed by it. I just, as I left, I was underwhelmed and I was just like, yeah, you know, it was, it's a kind of an aesthetic of Karo and Jeanet, you know, the delicatessen, amelie-poulin films, even Costa Rica in some ways, but like cleaner and more aesthetic.
00:07:14
Speaker
Aseptic. So it has that kind of, which they call, you know, steampunk aesthetic, which is a sort of Victorian futurism. So there's that aesthetic, but what's really, I mean, the hypothesis of the film is basically that a woman is saved or reanimated, brought back to life by implanting the brain of her
00:07:38
Speaker
child that was in her womb in her brain. And so she comes back to life with the brain of a child. And then the whole film develops with this character played by Emma Stone, who's this grown woman who has the brain of a child.
00:07:54
Speaker
But the brain is developing at fast speeds. So obviously throughout the film, she begins as a toddler and then she finishes as a sort of young adult or a teenager. And the choice of Yagoz Lanthimos was to have this hypothesis, which was that the character was going to be extremely free sexually and was going to explore the world. So she leaves the house of the Frankensteinian character that brought her to life. There's not a hint of hair.
00:08:24
Speaker
There's no like the medieval's would say humans of the body, you know, you don't have any milky substances, you know, it's so clean. And the way she discovers sex is so immediately delivered to the male characters. And, you know, and she goes out to discover the world and she talks to about six people, like the world she discovers is so small, and mainly men.
00:08:53
Speaker
And then there's this scene, the brothel scene, and I'm not prudish by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, I wanted more flesh, more stuff. For me, this was falsely daring. And the visuals of a young, beautiful woman fucking a whole array of inverted commas, monstrous men, is such a trope. And because the thing with film, and I find this irresponsible, is that
00:09:24
Speaker
we remember images more than narratives. When we're watching films and we're in that immersive contemplative state, the images stay. And I mean, I have the image of those two kids watching that sex scene and it's never going to go away. And I don't want my subconscious with that kind of gratuitous, unimaginative image in my head that didn't serve any purpose whatsoever. I liked it. I loved it. I thought it was great. I mean, I, you know, I see what you're saying about
00:09:54
Speaker
You know kind of the shock of you know women and sex like it's not you know particularly shocking but I mean I think he was just trying to take us on a ride, you know, and he was giving us this Futuristic, you know surreal atmosphere
00:10:13
Speaker
to examine it. I think he's probably not going to show goosebumps and harden nipples because that's just not the kind of film he's making. He's making something in a hyper-reality. This woman has been patched together from the remains of her unborn child. This is all from Frankenstein, who was the guy that played her dad?
00:10:43
Speaker
William the foe that's it. Yeah, so it's all from his fever dream I mean even talked about like, you know, I thought I might want to have sex with her But I you know, I can't cross that line It's like, you know, so all of that is is out there He is creating someone maybe in somewhere in his mind that is more than a daughter, you know, and I mean she's you know
00:11:07
Speaker
I mean, I see what you mean in terms of the fact that she wants to have sex and feels empowered by sex is not a radical idea.
00:11:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, another read on that is so she starts off very much in the mold of, you know, what male sexuality is expecting from women. And then she feels more empowered as she lives her life and explores. I think my interpretation of it is different than yours.
00:11:39
Speaker
Anyway, we're going to go into what brought us here today.
Richter's Influence and Artistry
00:11:44
Speaker
So do you want to introduce Gerhard Hichter for our listeners? Yeah, for sure. So happy to. So this week we're looking at Gerhard Richter, who has an exhibition at the David's Werner Gallery in London until the 20th of March. I wasn't familiar with the name.
00:12:01
Speaker
And then once I got to the exhibition and saw a couple of the squeegee paintings, there was a bell that rang somewhere in my mind. And I was like, ah, he seems pretty big. Like, I think I have seen this stuff before. And I was shocked that the name wasn't sort of right on the tip of my tongue and right at the forefront of
00:12:24
Speaker
My memory, because I mean, this guy gets phrases like greatest living painter attached to him. Most expensive painting ever in the world is attached to him. So it's like, there's that. I mean, he's he's credited with saving painting. Yeah. So I was a bit humbled by the fact that I when you mentioned that that this is one that we should cover, that it didn't ring any bells immediately.
00:12:51
Speaker
Can I tell you? I was a bit, I mean full disclosure now for our listeners, I was a bit cheeky with you because I told you about Hichter and you said yeah I've seen the show and I'd love to take this on and I thought yes I want Emily to take this on because she's not
00:13:09
Speaker
You're not affected by all the conversations and all the intensity around him. And I wanted to hear your side of the story and how you would present him because you're intelligent, you're sensible, you love art. And at the same time, you're not kind of like, you know, formed by all this scholarship around it. So I apologize in front of all our listeners because Emily then sent me a text message saying, um, this guy is huge.
00:13:39
Speaker
I was like, he's like a slippery ball. It's like you can't really get a grip on it. And you think you have it sort of steady in your hands and then it slips out again. And also, if I may add, you're coming at the end of his career. So he's 92 years old. So you just had to take on the task of just getting the whole career of an artist who's still alive.
00:14:08
Speaker
who's talking to things that make a lot of sense to us still, and who has met everyone in the art world. He's followed by lots of art critics, art historians. So it was a huge enterprise, Emily, and I
00:14:25
Speaker
Honestly, I think you're great for doing this. Well, we shall see. Our listeners will be the determinant of that. But there's loads of things that have been written about him. So I don't want to make it sound like that's not the case, but he's also quite a private person. I mean, he had this John Cage quote that he was fond of.
00:14:47
Speaker
I have nothing to say and I'm saying it, you know, and that kind of felt a bit like him. It's like there's volumes on this guy and still I didn't feel like I was getting to grips with him. And I can also add that he did say that for him
00:15:04
Speaker
painting, which is, of course, he has other mediums, but it's his main occupation and it's his main worry, was for him a way of thinking without words. So his relationship to painting is very different from Guston's, I think. Guston was very visceral about painting, whereas Hichter
00:15:24
Speaker
is not in that relationship of body to body with the canvas. There's something else going on that we will explore for sure today. Yeah, exactly. He was born and dressed in Germany in 1932. His father was a teacher, his mother was a bookseller, and it had an avid interest in literature and music. She was quite a cultured woman.
00:15:47
Speaker
When Gerhard was three, the family moved to the countryside, which was a huge blow to his mother, who just really loved the cultural buzz of Dresden. But this was a move that surely saved their lives. I mean, Dresden was obliterated in World War II. So I mean, it's really hard to imagine that they would have been, you know, as safe as they were in the countryside.
00:16:14
Speaker
So, of course, a year after he was born, the National Socialist Party took control, the Nazi Party and Hitler was chancellor. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and his father was conscripted to fight on the Eastern Front.
00:16:30
Speaker
So that meant that Richter was without his father between the ages of seven and 14. So his mother had more freedom to indulge him in the arts. He was her
Richter's Early Life and Influences
00:16:40
Speaker
favorite. He had a younger sister, but his mother really adored Gerhard and very much encouraged his artistic endeavors. And the marital match was not a great one. She sort of thought of herself. OK, tell me about that.
00:16:59
Speaker
She thought of herself as the intellectual superior to her husband and her husband who was a teacher and then was constricted to fight in the war. She was disappointed that he didn't distinguish himself. In what sense? Intellectually or in the war, becoming a war hero, what did she mean? I don't know that he was a war hero. I think he fought in the war and had a miserable time for seven years and came back as a
00:17:29
Speaker
you know somewhat broken man as I imagine a lot of people did you know more people came back you know as opposed to Marina Abramovich's parents who were war heroes you know and very much had the valor around them for that I don't get the sense that
00:17:45
Speaker
Richter's dad came back with that kind of prominence at all. She was a social climber. She liked the cultural buzz and the society around it, and she wanted to have some status in that. He wasn't interested. Gerhard was the prime funnel through which she poured all of her unfulfilled hopes.
00:18:10
Speaker
So, oh my gosh, no pressure. None whatsoever. You think of someone who's disappointed about their husband not distinguishing themselves, and then you generate a son who is the greatest living painter, who gets called to greatest living. It's like there's a symbiosis there.
00:18:30
Speaker
I mean, Gerhard said that his mother had an elitist way about her. To be a meaningful person from her perspective, one had to be a writer, an artist, or an intellectual. So some pressure, for sure. That lays it all out. And what I find incredible is that she had all this ambition while they were watching Dresden being bombed.
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah, so after the war, Richter failed every subject in a college prep school, even drawing. And it did reference the fact that after the war, his father comes back and they had to do a lot of bartering for food. I mean, food was scarce, times were incredibly difficult.
00:19:15
Speaker
Sorry, sorry to interrupt, but apparently he also had an aunt who had some form of mental illness. Schizophrenia. He was hospitalized, you know, invented commerce by the Nazis and ended up dying, I think, in great suffering. So he was in some way, his family was also the victim of this Nazi ideology, I guess.
00:19:38
Speaker
For sure. Yeah, no, she was from what I read. She was in a camp and starved to death because of her illness. She was in a camp. Goodness me. The largest portion was Jewish people that were in the camps, but there were also queer people and migrants and any people that they thought were just not great for the Aryan race.
00:20:05
Speaker
Yeah, Eugenics was in, you know, Eugenics was like a big trend. It was. It was trending massively. Trending. Yep, yep, went viral. He takes two apprenticeships in signmaking and stagecraft and then he applies to the Dresden Art Academy.
00:20:24
Speaker
His portfolio was rejected for being too bourgeois at the time. So this is both for Germany. And they suggested that he take a state job and then reapply as applicants from state jobs were favored. So he did that and got into the Dresden Academy in 1951. So now Richter, who left Dresden when he was three, and now he is 19,
00:20:52
Speaker
is moved back to Dresden. But it's a mess. I mean, it's an absolute mess after the war. So the bombing attack on Dresden stands among the most controversial Allied actions of World War II. It was a war crime. So the 13th to the 15th of February 1945, 800 bombers dropped some 2,700 tons of explosives and incendiaries on the city.
00:21:18
Speaker
Oh my goodness. A firestorm erupted there. Yeah, tens of thousands died. I mean, it was an absolute atrocity. So not to give sort of a justification to the bombing of Dresden, but it took place three weeks after the discovery of Auschwitz and four weeks after the Battle of the Bulbs where 19,000 troops were killed, US troops were killed.
00:21:45
Speaker
So when Richter is going to Academy, he's wading through rubble to get to his classes. I mean, it's just rubble buildings everywhere. So Dresden, you know, is not the cultural capital that Richter's mother enjoyed anymore, obviously. I mean, destroyed completely.
00:22:02
Speaker
destroyed, but also there's not that ethic there anymore. So after the war, art is a vehicle to glorify work and socialist ideals. So there isn't this freedom. Unless you're painting someone swinging a hammer or waving a flag, it's not really acceptable.
00:22:21
Speaker
But nonetheless, Richter learned mural painting and he continued some commercial work as a sign painter, which I think is also like the sign painting. I feel like that comes back later on in his work in some of the paintings that you see of more mundane things, of some kind of the photo paintings that he does.
00:22:43
Speaker
And there's a discussion that he has in one of the videos I saw online. And I think it was the curator at the Tate. It was a video around the panorama exhibition. And they were like, well, why did you leave? And he was like, it was terrible. Like, it was absolutely terrible. So I mean, but it's funny with people who don't express themselves a lot and who don't
00:23:10
Speaker
expand on their emotions, that terrible carries so much weight when he talks about it. Because in Dresden, and I think this is important and that's why I'm bringing this up, in the Academy, that's where he found out about the camps. And he found out about the camps through pictures, through photographs. And that's a crucial moment for him because they were there studying, glorifying, whatever, you know,
00:23:40
Speaker
political system was being established.
00:23:44
Speaker
I think the beginning of the 20th century, I saw a film where you could see his studio and he still has a photograph of the camps being discovered and dealt with by the Allies. And it's through a window of a plane and he just says, I have this image here and what really strikes me is that there's a casual conversation and you see the bodies
00:24:11
Speaker
lying, piled up, and two soldiers are talking, are chatting. And he still had that image. And I think that is a crucial thing for his work, and this idea of the signs as well, with this idea of how language
00:24:27
Speaker
can immediately become propaganda. I think it's really important to him. In 1959, Richter visited an exhibition showcasing works by Jackson Pollock and others which made Richter aware that there was something wrong with my whole way of thinking.
00:24:42
Speaker
So in March 61, just a few months before the construction of the Berlin Wall began, he travels to Moscow and Leningrad as a tourist, carrying a ton of luggage, way more than he needed. And on his journey back, he just remained on the train as it went through to West Germany. He gets off the train, leaves all his bags in storage, returns to Dresden to get his wife, Emma,
00:25:10
Speaker
And then a friend drives them to East Berlin. And apparently there was this loophole at the time where it's like if you took the underground, which still connected East and West Berlin, you could just get on and take it over. And from that point on, he doesn't see his family. I mean, that's the last time. And he had these creative connections in Dresden as well, which were really meaningful and important to him. And I think some of those people he sees again.
00:25:40
Speaker
You know that if you don't move, you're not going to be working in the way that you want to. And you just have to leave, even though you have so many roots there. The moral of this story to me is the power of exhibitions. He goes, he sees this exhibition of Pollock in 59 and by 61. So people, let's not underestimate how life-changing going to an exhibition could be.
00:26:07
Speaker
So we settled in Düsseldorf and he studies at the Academy there. And he explores paintings' relationship to photography mostly through images of families, often his own.
Richter's Artistic Development and Style
00:26:21
Speaker
You mentioned his Aunt Mary-Anne, so there's one that he does of his Aunt Mary-Anne who is
00:26:28
Speaker
killed in a camp for schizophrenia, his uncle Rudy, who died fighting in the war. So these are part of his early work and photographic images, and he does a lot on military aircraft. These are really incredible paintings of photos of Allied warplanes dropping bombs. He
00:26:49
Speaker
comes at a point in the history of art or in contemporary art, let's say, at the end of the 20th century where
00:27:00
Speaker
Painting had been proclaimed to be dead many times. He had a job, a photography shop, so he developed photographs. He did that to earn some money in the beginning of his career. This was a foundational experience for him because he was working on what had killed photography. So historically, photography constrained
00:27:27
Speaker
painting and made it... It turned painting into something that was difficult to validate and was difficult to defend unless it became abstract, unless it became abstract expressionist that is revealing internal states, unless it became very conceptual and monochromatic. So this is all kind of tracing all the history of painting until him.
00:27:52
Speaker
And when he looks at those photographs, he said, I want to do a photograph with painting. And that's the thing, that's the hook of the beginning of his practice. So his painting comes after photography and imitates photography. So he became very known for inserting into painting the glossiness of photography, the blurriness. So he's interested in photographs that don't work, the ones that people would chuck away when he was in this shop.
00:28:20
Speaker
Dido Morayama would approve. Totally. Totally. And so he was, you know, he was not painting what he saw. His whole practice of painting had to do with looking at images and therefore that foundational moment where he saw the camps in those images. And what are those images saying about history and about tragedy?
00:28:48
Speaker
and about cruelty and about humanity. And so painting comes as a second layer where you're thinking about those images. But what a task. I mean, he comes from the country that shocked the whole world.
00:29:04
Speaker
And he's making paintings that are flowers, clouds, landscapes that seem regressive in some ways to certain critics. And he developed a very big friendship with a big, huge art historian called Benjamin Buchloh, who was a German who immigrated to the United States. They've been friends for 50 years. And Buchloh says that they mostly don't agree, because Buchloh is this kind of art historian.
00:29:33
Speaker
who is a Marxist, so he sees history as a sort of progression towards something. And so, of course, for him, it no longer makes sense to paint, but then you keep on painting, and painting and art is on
00:29:48
Speaker
a few pillars that are very strong, obviously all men, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Reimann, Jasper Johns, he is this kind of art historian who is thinking in terms of culture immediately and never in terms of the subconscious, in terms of what an image can visually bring up in you.
00:30:09
Speaker
And Richter always keeps his enemies close. He said that, and I can't remember what paintings those were, but I think probably Jasper Johns and someone else, that he kept images of them in his studio because he can't understand them and he doesn't agree with them. So he is humble
00:30:30
Speaker
in his stance because he is revered by bringing people the solace of being able to look at beautiful images without guilt, so without going against
00:30:44
Speaker
the prompt of modernism and the avant-gardes, and at the same time, bringing a sort of criticism and a sort of moral or ethical grounds where painting can stand on. And I'm not sure he's very happy about that because he's not here to serve people beauty again. I presume that's not his goal.
00:31:09
Speaker
He's deeply thinking about the power of images and how painting can redeem or not. And of course, Benjamin Buchlob says that's a failure. The whole Richter project is a failure. And is that kind of art historian? When you think of failure of modernism, of utopias,
00:31:30
Speaker
Why are we talking about this in this sense? Because, you know, art doesn't have that impact on culture, you know, because who sees exhibitions and things in those terms. But, you know, so he talks about the modernist project and the, you know,
00:31:45
Speaker
whatever, as big failures and because everything is going towards something based on Marcel Duchamp who changed everything in art. I think he's very humble because he knows he's taking on a huge task and he's just a man and he's just a person who lives something really gruesome that brought to him a very specific perspective of being the hated German but also the one who suffered. Uncle Rudy is an incredible painting where I remember seeing it back in the day and thinking,
00:32:14
Speaker
Oh my gosh, he did it. Yeah, he's quite a character. Yeah, totally. So he moves to abstraction, which obviously a lot of painters were doing in that time. I mean, that wasn't a sort of, you know, a new thing. You know, he did a lot of these gray paintings and he did these color studies, which were basically kind of think of a Pantone chart of color
00:32:39
Speaker
polar charts. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he did a lot of that. And it's funny because in the film, sorry, in the film I watched, Robert Stor is going around a big retrospective exhibition he had with him. He's probably the curator of the exhibition. And he says, well, he's always trying to see, say, is this abstract? That's the question he keeps on asking because
00:33:01
Speaker
for art critics is like, where is the abstraction? Is the blurriness the abstraction? Where can we save this beautiful painting of a cloud that is so appealing but that no longer makes sense when we think about everything we've gone through during the 20th century? And he says, well, no, it's not abstract. It's a color chart. So I had a color chart and I just copied it.
00:33:24
Speaker
And he's just looking at images. And one of the works that I remember seeing of his and thinking, I don't care. What is happening here is the Atlas. So the Atlas is a huge collection of images. And I remember being struck by an image of a man being eaten by a lion.
00:33:45
Speaker
that he took from a newspaper, and apparently it was something that happened at the Berlin Zoo, where a man fell on the lion pit, and the lions grabbed him and killed him and ate him. And I remember looking at that image. It was so hard to look at, and I was thinking, why would he include this in an exhibition? Why is he showing us these working images?
00:34:08
Speaker
And I never forgot that image because it was so hard to look at. And I remember thinking, this is the kind of thing that we'll see in the newspaper and I will turn the page very quickly, but we'll obsessively think about. And I remember thinking about that obsessively for a few days. It comes up and you think, wow, what is this? And it really is someone who's tackling
00:34:32
Speaker
all kinds of images. Why was there an image of that? And I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of questions when we think about... I think I've been reading a bit of Black activists talking about the images of Black men mostly being shot or being killed, like George Floyd, obviously the horrible murder of George Floyd and others,
00:34:58
Speaker
in the press and the videos that someone took from a camera and saying, this is black suffering porn. And I remember thinking, I'm not going to watch these videos again. And I made a decision of reading the text and not looking at the image. And I think he's asking that question. I mean, that's a personal thing. I'm not saying that you shouldn't look at them. And I think that's what the questions he's asking, like, why are these images coming up?
00:35:23
Speaker
And, but if I hadn't had those images in Dresden, I wouldn't have known so specifically what was going on. You know, looking a bit further ahead, I mean, the Bader-Meinhof paintings, you know, that he took, or of September, September 11th, you know, paintings that he did off of images from the day.
Richter's Engagement with Historical Events
00:35:45
Speaker
I don't know those ones. I've never seen them.
00:35:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of the, you know, the very iconic picture of the Twin Towers and the first plane that goes in and the explosion from it. So he does both Bader Meinhof was maybe
00:36:02
Speaker
think 10 years after the terror attacks. And so Bader Meinhof was the group that was operated in West Germany, and it was pro-communism and socialism and was kind of very left-wing extremist. And then, you know, had, you know,
00:36:22
Speaker
various terror attacks over a couple of decades. One big one in 1977. And then obviously the Twin Towers attack, it was a few, I think it was eight years after that he showed those works from the photographs of the day. But yeah. How interesting, isn't it? That he waits a decade in both instances and then paints it. Like he's trying to say, don't forget this. This happened.
00:36:52
Speaker
They don't say anything about those people, and they show someone alive, and then they show someone on the ground dead. They're quite impactful, very strong. And they also absorb that inability of photography to say anything about something. It just leaves the thing in the open. I have nothing to say, and I'm saying it. I mean, the fact that I'm trying to
00:37:20
Speaker
I thought he was saying, I have nothing to say. I was like, okay, I need to go on with this. All right. Well, let's wrap up then. But yeah, he's going back to the Duchamp reference.
00:37:36
Speaker
and the picture that he made of Emma, his wife Emma, the nude of her coming down the stairs. And that was his sort of response to Duchamp's, was it Cubist?
00:37:54
Speaker
Yeah, it was Duchamp's attempt at Cubism, which was unconvincing for the Cubists. There's a big story behind that painting, which is that he was very, very influenced by sequential photography, by Muybridge, but particularly by Etienne-Jules Mahé, who was kind of the Muybridge counterpart of France. And so these were photographs that were done in the 19th century, where the same movement
00:38:24
Speaker
was printed on the same photograph. So you could see someone walking or jumping and you could see all the movements of that action. And so he was much more fascinated by that than by cubism. Of course, he wanted to be part of a group. You always want to belong and you want to show your work. But Juchon was fascinated by technology. He was basically
00:38:52
Speaker
He was going solo. I mean, he was thinking about, and that's what's interesting of the disconnect between Richter and Marcel Duchamp is that he was also thinking of images that Duchamp, but he was thinking in terms of linguistics of the power of words and concepts over images. And so, because Marcel Duchamp also said dumb as a painter.
00:39:16
Speaker
He was not into painting, Duchamp. So for him, if painting was only a retinion, was only something that pertained to the eye and your relationship between the eye, what you see on the canvas, and reality, that wasn't enough. And he was in love with photography. And that was so interesting because
00:39:35
Speaker
Richter goes to photography, but how it produces images, so the side of the image produced. Whereas Duchamp is interested in the deconstruction through technology of the mind. He was someone who thought a lot about exhibition spaces. Museums are new, if you think about it. We haven't had museums for a long time in history.
00:39:57
Speaker
painting was for the people who could afford them or for the churches, but it wasn't a space. And Duchamp thought a lot about what you do in that space and how you behave and what the spectator is doing there. What are you doing there as an artist as well? What are you
00:40:15
Speaker
What kind of experience are you promoting? So yeah. One of the things that looking into Rechter made me think about is, so I think I told you I've been reading this E.M. Forrester, Two Cheers for Democracy. It's a collection of writings and of lectures that he'd given and he has one
00:40:38
Speaker
that is entitled Art for Art's
Art's Role in Society
00:40:42
Speaker
Sake. I don't know if you've heard this one before, but he kind of talks about how... I don't know those writings. I'm really enjoying it. It's kind of nice, like...
00:40:51
Speaker
on a practical level because they're short. And it's a good dip in, dip out, you know? So like you sort of keep it around and you can consume one in a sitting and it's, you know, without too much effort. And this kind of made me think of
00:41:09
Speaker
Richter's environment in Dresden before he left East Germany because E.M. Forster is talking about order as it is understood from a state perspective as orders.
00:41:25
Speaker
an order from an artist's perspective, which is internal. And he's saying that art is an expression of internal order. So it's like, there's no critiquing it. There's no, this is right or wrong. It's an expression of an internal order and that it's one of the only ways that you can actually engage with somebody's internal order.
00:41:48
Speaker
Just to read a little bit, so the second possibility for order lies in the aesthetic category, which is my subject here. The order which an artist can create his own work. A work of art, we are all agreed, is a unique product. But why? Is it unique? It is unique not because it is clever or noble or beautiful or enlightened or original or sincere or idealistic or useful or educational. It may embody all of those qualities or none of them.
00:42:17
Speaker
It's unique because it is the only material object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All others have been pressed into shape from the outside, and when their mold is removed, they collapse. A work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always, delusively. Delusively?
00:42:48
Speaker
Yeah, illusively. So he says, Renaissance Rome made a mess, but the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel got painted. James I made a mess, but there was Macbeth. Louis XIV also, but there was Fader.
00:43:10
Speaker
Fader. I don't know that one. Art for art's sake, I should think so, but more than ever at the present time. He talked about Macbeth in more detail and he was saying, yeah, you learn a little bit about Scotland, you learn a little bit about
00:43:29
Speaker
Jack could be in England in there, but really what you're learning is Shakespeare's point of view, is Shakespeare's perception and creativity and, you know, take on all of it. That's the point of it, is not...
00:43:44
Speaker
It's not valuable because you learn a little something on the side, although that could be valuable. Anyway, it made me think of Richter because of the conditions that he was in in East Germany and that transition across that invisible line between East and West Germany. Duchamp was notorious for being very weary of the notion of taste.
00:44:12
Speaker
the notion of habit. So he wanted, as soon as he thought he was developing any form of style, because style is what defines something recognizable within the body of work, he would move to something else. He didn't want to be recognizable. And it's funny because Tanya Kovac also said that. She said that in her own exhibition,
00:44:34
Speaker
all the works could have been made by 10 different artists and that she loved that. And so this idea of the personal perspective is such a tricky one because art for art's sake is definitely the other extreme of Benjamin book law. It's not about culture, it's not holding the culture, it's not teaching you anything, it's just
00:44:56
Speaker
standing there for someone because Forster was a writer. I was thinking about the importance of printed images, of the fact that suddenly after photography, you can replicate images. The print as opposed to photography for literature was liberating. The fact that you can reprint and reprint a book is liberating. You get to your readership and you develop
00:45:23
Speaker
a relationship to the written word that was unprecedented. But when it comes to replicating images through technology, when images are reproducible, then the uniqueness or the perspective of the artist is no longer based on a single object. Walter Benjamin talked about the loss of the aura of the artwork.
00:45:53
Speaker
Because when you're talking about images, you're not...
00:45:57
Speaker
I mean, the material of the artwork is what makes the artwork, that specific object. And that brings us to the exhibition because Hichte, with all the apprehension he has about Marcel Duchamp and about certain avant-gardes, he has one of his most famous paintings in the exhibition photographed.
Richter's Use of Reflective Elements
00:46:21
Speaker
So it's an edition, it's an editioned artwork.
00:46:25
Speaker
And it's the skull. Oh, yeah. I, you know, we worry with our daughter and I said, oh, this is one of his famous paintings, but something was off from afar. And as we got there, I thought this is not a painting. It's under glass. What the heck is this? And so it is an image of his own artwork that you can and that is worked on. There's a sort of layering of grays up above, like a sort of a digital file almost.
00:46:53
Speaker
And it's really interesting that he has a whole bunch of works and you have another version of that in the exhibition on the first floor, which is the mirrors. And so he works a lot on sculptures that replicate the glossy side of photography when you used to print photographs from analogic cameras and from film.
00:47:20
Speaker
you had a certain glossiness to them that made them appealing as objects. The fact that when you're looking at a photograph, even if you go to photography exhibitions, you are yourself reflected on the glass or on the photograph, especially if you have very dark photographs. So his relationship to the painted image is mediated in some ways and already welcomes someone else in them because there's a very famous one
00:47:49
Speaker
which says tortoise, or something in German, the word is cut. It's a very famous painting from the 80s. And it was a newspaper cutting, a little bit like Korschwitters could have done before. Korschwitters, who actually had to flee Germany to come to England,
00:48:10
Speaker
and was in a camp here, an immigrant camp for a long, long time, suffered quite a bit. And he would also work with newspaper cuttings, but history is painting them, so he's imitating them in some ways. But that organization of the newspaper was done by someone else. And Duchamp said something really interesting as well is that he invented the ready-made. So this idea of the work is already made, because I'm just taking objects to the exhibition space,
00:48:39
Speaker
And he also said the tubes of paint are readymates. So even if you're painting at the moment, you're not making your own pigments. So you're already producing readymates with painting, whatever you do afterwards as an image, whatever you produce or whatever you paint, you're already using readymates, which are tubes of paint. So you're already in an industrialized world full of images. Hmm.
00:49:04
Speaker
So yeah, I should talk about the exhibition. No, but the skull and the reflective nature of the glass so that you see yourself in the image as well as seeing the image itself. That's the bit that made me think of the Vietnam War Memorial in DC. Did you ever see it when you were there?
00:49:27
Speaker
So this is the one, it's a huge wall and it's all of the names of those who died or were missing in Vietnam. And it's really controversial when it was made by this undergraduate artist at Yale whose parents immigrated to the States from China.
00:49:57
Speaker
And the work is all below ground. So the wall is like cut into the ground. So you kind of, you go down this little ramp to look at all of the names. Oh yes, I remember it. The surface is a very glossy black that the names are etched into. So you can't help but see yourself as you are regarding the names. And the way that it goes is,
00:50:26
Speaker
it kind of starts small and then gets really thick in the middle and then gets smaller again. And that represents the sort of timeline of the war where not that many people died at first and then just so many people died in that middle bit. And then there was, you know, it was kind of a
00:50:45
Speaker
a war that we tiptoed into and then tried to tiptoe out of. So the deaths were less towards the tail end as well. So it kind of represents that timeline. And people did not like it because it was not valorous or honorable.
00:51:05
Speaker
Like you know most war memorials are you think of people waving flags you think of people doing something soldiers doing something commanding and with a lot of heroism and this was like no let's just look at the names of the dead.
00:51:21
Speaker
And the way that it was done as well, the fact that it was underground, just everybody was like, this is too morbid. It was actually held up by the Reagan administration because there was so much turmoil over, can we actually put something like this on the Washington Mall?
00:51:41
Speaker
But when was it made? From what time? In the 80s? Yeah, early 80s. Yeah, it would have been, you know, for sure. So what do you think? What do you make of it? Yeah, I mean I think she was
00:52:04
Speaker
not the usual artist for this kind of thing and came at it with a really different realistic approach. I mean, this was a war of just insufferable tragedy and loss. I mean,
00:52:20
Speaker
and so avoidable. So, I mean, just pointless. I mean, we can't say we won. But I think what she did brilliantly with it is just reflect the tragedy of it all. It was tragic. This was just a really glossy black and it was underground. And
00:52:43
Speaker
But it did bring to mind how he brings you, the viewer, into what he's doing through that reflective nature. And at first, when I first saw it, I was annoyed because I felt like I couldn't kind of get as good a look at it as I wanted to. And then, of course, that's the point. It resists you. And then the mirror upstairs
00:53:08
Speaker
you are completely in the image. It yields to you and to your surroundings in a way that is so bizarre when you think of an artist who's so prolific like he was and who painted absolutely everything. It's also ready-made. It's also a mirror. I mean,
00:53:28
Speaker
in as much as it is something that exists outside and is an object that you place in your home with a certain function, maybe had it cut to a certain... I don't know about the dimensions. I wonder if it's Polaroid dimension. I kind of wonder because it's kind of square. But readymades were not just placing objects in the museum sometimes.
00:53:50
Speaker
Duchamp would write something on them. He would turn them around. I mean, they weren't just placing objects in the exhibition space. So it's kind of funny to see that he kind of goes there. So those are the two works in the exhibition that are reminiscent of much earlier works from the 80s and the 90s. And then you have a very surprising
00:54:18
Speaker
Presence of drawing in the exhibition. Mm-hmm. It's just it's just so strange Why did you find it strange? Um, I don't think I'd ever seen I'd seen reproductions of drawings he made but Probably from his Atlas, I think but I had never seen these very free although within certain constraints of this the the the the stain or the
00:54:48
Speaker
the evolution of the material on the paper. And then this kind of game he plays at some point, he seems to be placing eyes on the shapes. He made me think of that Leonardo da Vinci writing where he says that if you look at a stain of mold on the wall, you will see a battle, you will see a tempest, you will end up seeing stuff. And he seems like he's playing that game at some point.
00:55:15
Speaker
I didn't see it. It was my husband, Jogo, was there with me, and Kwaśna, our daughter, and they said, yeah, obviously there's a bird here, there's a duck there, and I hadn't seen them at all. And I was saying, but maybe you were saying, I mean, we had a whole debate in there, like, are you seeing this, or do you think you did it on purpose? So that was not what I expected to be talking about in an exhibition by Gerhard Hichter.
00:55:41
Speaker
Yeah. So that was that was surprising. So there's lots of drawing downstairs. And then there's the collages as well. There's those collages, those like construction paper collages. What did you think of those? So people who have not been there, it is like literally construction paper that your kids would have cut in different shapes and glued together. And there's actual
00:56:07
Speaker
kind of stains from the glue. Like you see the messiness of construction. Like your five-year-old was doing something. Exactly. It's like your five-year-old was making a drawing and you go like, yeah, well, you can see the glue, but it's fine, honey. You did amazing assemblage of colors.
00:56:28
Speaker
Yeah, what do you think of those? See, I found those the most surprising. Oh, yeah, me too. And we were a bit baffled by them, to be honest, all of us. You see David Zwirner is now working with him and probably is going into the studio and looking at stuff that hasn't been looked at. And so those drawings also, what you could see is that they have dates. So they seem to be drawings that he's making on a specific day. And they made me think of the equivalence by Alfred Stiglitz.
00:56:57
Speaker
which were, so Alfred Stiglitz was Giorgio Keith's husband, he was a photographer, very big friend of Duchamp by the way, and he decided to take pictures of the sky in order to test the ability of photography, the landscape, or an atmospheric situation to be abstract, basically. And so you have beautiful images of different skies, different
00:57:26
Speaker
clouds and they're not monumental pictures, they're small pictures. It's quite a famous endeavor in art history. And they kind of made me think of that. They're kind of atmospheric and strange. And then he goes as usual and he kind of has to do another layer of things and he traces lines on them. And the papers are also these kind of geometric like cuttings
00:57:52
Speaker
And they're very colorful, so they're different colors. They have strong yellows. And they also replicate something that I had never thought about, and then they made me think about, were Richter's colors for the abstract works. Because he never has pastels. He always has very loud, striking colors. And it was what you could find in those drawings. And I wondered, because the way he makes those abstract paintings is that he starts by gesturing on a canvas with certain colors,
00:58:22
Speaker
he kind of has an expansive gesture, which could be finished paintings. And then he starts squeezing, if that could be a verb, on them. He starts applying other layers and layers and layers of paint that he scrapes off, drags onto the canvas, et cetera. And those colors are never pastel. They're always loud striking colors. And they're the colors of the collages. And that's the only relation I could make because other than that,
00:58:51
Speaker
You know, I was thinking in an auction in 50 years, you see that drawing and you see Rishte, you'll be like, yeah, Rishte? Max Rishte, the composer? So probably the gallerist went to his studio and Rishte told him, you know, this is kind of like,
00:59:10
Speaker
maybe compositions that I made to prepare the abstract paintings. That's what I thought. That's my hypothesis. And he said, let's show them. Let's show them. You're 92 years old. At the end of your, this may be a good document for someone who's really passionate about the work to have because they kind of relate. But I honestly don't. I have no idea. I was baffled.
00:59:35
Speaker
So he has those drawings downstairs. And then as you go upstairs, by the way, David Zwirner is such a lovely space. I love that space. It's sort of a townhouse in the middle of Mayfair. But it's such a good space. I've seen the most amazing exhibitions in there. It has the right size. It's not those huge galleries that look like Kunstverein. It's a nice sized gallery.
01:00:00
Speaker
I always love visiting the shows there. You know, the snottyness of Mayfair notwithstanding.
Richter's Exhibitions and Abstract Works
01:00:08
Speaker
And so I went to the first floor and I saw this mirror and I was like, okay, interesting. And then there's, so that you have the mirror on the left and then you have another gray image, which kind of connects to the one downstairs. It's on the same wall of the skull.
01:00:27
Speaker
But this grey image is empty and he has made these indentations on what it seems the glass that covers it. And this is also an addition to work. It's also kind of a photographic style kind of work.
01:00:43
Speaker
JPEG file kind of work, I guess. And then in front of it, you have this huge work that is also photographic and kind of digital, like an expansion of colors.
01:00:58
Speaker
there are these parallel, very thin lines of very different colors that goes across that big, big, big wall there. And in front of that painting, you still have those drawings which are expenses of color that he kind of manipulates, revisits,
01:01:18
Speaker
very atmospheric, very beautiful, but that seemed to be, I guess, they seemed to be the nightmare of each other, each work, which I found the relationship and the dialogue interesting because it's dialectic. It's kind of like oppositional, confrontational, the little drawings, almost kind of naive, sincere drawings with, on the other side, that big
01:01:46
Speaker
stretched linear, colorful work that is on dibon, I think. It's kind of a printed image on dibon with a glass over it that is sophisticated and industrial and urban. It's probably like four meters across. I mean, it's huge. I mean, it's really, really huge. And the moment you get to the top of the stairs, the thing is pulsing. I mean, you can't
01:02:11
Speaker
you can't be in that room and not feel it like just vibrating with energy. I mean, it's a really kind of remarkable thing to be in front of. I mean, the front of the panorama book has one of those images
01:02:32
Speaker
And so I, you know, it was like, you know, I, you see those images in books and you're like, yeah, right. Okay. That's, that's interesting. Very clean, as you say, kind of industrial. But then when you're standing in front of it, it's like, Oh God, it's like,
01:02:48
Speaker
I don't know how long I can take it, you know? I mean, it's, yeah, and you're right. Then you go into that next room and it's like these sweet watercolors and sketches and very nostalgic and they bring you in and they're tender on the eye and kind of tender to the spirit. And then this thing out there is just pulsing away to its own beat and vibration.
01:03:13
Speaker
And what about the abstract? So downstairs, something I did mention is that you have a couple of abstract paintings, so the famous works that made you tilt and go, wait a minute, I know this guy. What do you make of those, the squeegees? I love them. I just love the whole notion of it. I mean, I love the chance
01:03:37
Speaker
I love the curiosity. I love the fact. So as you said, layers and layers of paint, he goes on not with a brush, but with a giant squeegee to like scrape the paint off. So I imagine it is just a mess to create these and a super physical job. It's like you see him working on these with these giant squeegees and taking these
01:04:00
Speaker
massive amount of paint off and just kind of deciding, you know, seeing what comes out, what colors come out and what sort of shapes come out. And when I was watching some of the videos about him, he's like, anytime images come through that look a bit like a landscape or anything recognizable, I'm obliterating that, like I'm scraping beyond it and making sure that it's
01:04:26
Speaker
you know that it's not representative of anything. Do you imagine how did you see how he makes these paintings? Yeah yeah yeah yeah there's lots of videos of him making the paintings online and it's
01:04:43
Speaker
It's kind of hypnotic to watch, to be honest, just to watch him because they look so different and then the squeegee goes over them and you cannot imagine what's going to emerge. And then he kind of does sometimes vertical strokes, sometimes usually, I think, horizontal strokes.
01:05:03
Speaker
But yeah. And then sometimes he goes up and down a little bit, like producing a certain kind of vibration and something emerges from it and you're just so mesmerized by it. Yeah. And I love that he's not trying to make something. He's just seeing what gets made. I mean, and it kind of reminded me of like,
01:05:25
Speaker
It's, I mean, it's obviously he stops at a certain point and that is the image that we have. But you have this sense that it's like, like if you're writing a document and like it's your inflow and you've written a bunch and you hit save, like that's what that document is. That's what the text is going to be for then. You might add to it.
01:05:50
Speaker
And it might continue or it might just stop there. You get this sense of a pausing, but not a completion. Obviously, if he were to add more paint, it would be a very different thing. But you get this kind of continuity that you're seeing a snapshot of something that is
01:06:16
Speaker
is continuous rather than this is a final form. Of course, it is a final form, but it has a different sensibility to it rather than sort of something representational or even just kind of brush stroke abstract, which is more of the artist saying, this is kind of what I have in my mind and this is what I'm making. With him,
01:06:43
Speaker
He's seeing what's happening, what's going to happen. Those abstract paintings are also strangely going back to the photography thing.
01:06:52
Speaker
they also have that glossiness. When he drags the gray and the whites, and suddenly they have this kind of dragged quality of Uncle Rudy as well. They're so contemporary in some ways. You were comparing it with writing a document. That was a really interesting comparison. It made me think a lot about the way I write. I don't write on paper, and I remember feeling very guilty
01:07:22
Speaker
to not write on paper because I thought, oh, I'm not a real writer if I write on the computer. Isn't that funny? It's like these things we put on ourselves, it's like, oh, writing with one hand with a pen is obviously a better way to do it rather than two hands with a keyboard. But yeah. Yeah.
01:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's what writers do is they hold a pen and they write on a notebook.
Mediums and Creative Processes
01:07:50
Speaker
And I'm very conscious of the fact that
01:07:54
Speaker
What I write on a Word document is definitely not the same thing I would have written on a notebook. It's a completely different way of writing and thinking. It's a layered thing where you add on and then you can take a whole thing and then you can add on. And it's not a problem. It's not a physical thing to just go, oh, I wrote this whole text on my notebook and now I'm just maybe just
01:08:19
Speaker
scraping away a paragraph. So yeah, I mean, I think we've gone over the whole exhibition. I mean, it wasn't such a huge, huge exhibition. What would you take from the exhibition home? I mean, I'm presuming it's not the four meter. Yeah, no, I don't think I don't think I could have buy that in my household. But there's one of the watercolors. Let me see. I think I would take the skull.
01:08:49
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Nice. Excellent choice. Because, you know, it's a nostalgic very unlike me. I'm not, as you know, very keen on nostalgia. But there's a story, a personal story that I've had with Rishta, you know, I've seen his work when I was studying in Paris, I was 19 or 20. And I remember going to Marion Goodman Gallery and thinking,
01:09:17
Speaker
wow, what is this? And everyone was talking about Hishta because I was studying philosophy first and then I moved on to aesthetics. Yeah, that's it. That's what I would take home. Nice. Yeah. And 20-year-old Joanna would be so happy with that as well.
01:09:34
Speaker
So happy, delighted. Cool. So yeah, should we wrap
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:09:40
Speaker
this up? Yeah, let's do it. So that's it for today. I hope you've enjoyed spending time with us. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram at exhibitionistdoesunderscorepodcast.
01:09:52
Speaker
and subscribe if you would like to subscribe. We hope that you do and leave a review if you'd like to. We'll post our next episode in two weeks and until then, I hope you have a wonderful time. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.
01:10:21
Speaker
Bye!