“10 Oct. 98”

Details

We would like to thank Dr Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden, for his kind advice in cataloguing this work.
The work is listed in the online catalogue raisonné of overpainted photographs.

Provenance:
Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich;
Private collection, Munich, acquired from the aforementioned.

Description

• Extremely appealing companions to the large-format abstract paintings created at the same time
• In these photographic overpaintings, Gerhard Richter brings together the two artistic techniques that are central to his work: photography and painting
• This year, Gerhard Richter is once again listed as one of the world’s most important artists in the Art Compass ranking

• From the very beginning of his artistic career, photography, and in particular its relationship to painting, has played a central role in Gerhard Richter’s work. Richter has also been taking photographs himself for decades, in everyday life, while travelling or at exhibition openings. The basic material for the photo overpaintings are therefore his own photographs, mostly in 10×15 centimetre format. They make no artistic claim; they are often snapshots, private shots or travel impressions, such as panoramas from the Engadin.

“Overpainted” in the true sense of the word • one initially thinks of a brushwork • but the photos are not! Since the late 1970s, Gerhard Richter has been using so-called squeegees in his paintings • rigid scrapers with which the paint can be applied over a large area, spread or scraped off the canvas. Remnants of the used colour remain on the squeegee. Gerhard Richter now combines both techniques • photography and painting • in his photo overpaintings: Towards the end of a working day, the photographic prints are pulled through the still damp paint of the squeegee at varying speeds or pressed onto the remaining paint masses, then pulled off again, so that the smooth surface of the photograph is covered with thick layers of paint or a delicate coloured network of roots, sprinkled with splashes of paint or other random patterns. As a rule, the result is not reworked, so that the photo overpaintings leave room for chance, for spontaneous gestures. Some of these combinations result in new, completely unique motifs, while others seem meaningless to the artist. He keeps some and destroys others.

Materially and sensorially, two worlds collide in the photo overpaintings: the glossy photographic paper and the impasto colour. Sometimes the latter associatively expands the moment captured in the photograph when, as in “10 Oct. 98”, a filigree, white-red-green plant pushes itself in front of the rough mountain panorama of the Fex Valley. Often, however, the colour forms a deliberate contrast, powerfully and blazingly overlaying the grey landscape, as on “25 Sept. 98”, and contrasting with the dull cloudy sky.