Reading: Gerhard Richter Books and Publications

Panorama, London: Tate Publishing, 2011

Key Points and Reflections:

• The Panorama publication was factual in providing information about Gerhard Richter's background and meaning behind his work and his beliefs. 

• "Consequently [Richter] is sometimes described as an artist who recognises painting’s compromised role in the present day. However, this recognition has not stopped Richter from asking the most difficult questions of his practice. What are the capacities and limits of painting? What is its relationship to photography, and how can we think about its material status? What are its private and public roles? These are questions he explores to this day."p.2
• Richter here asks questions about concerning art in general, and particularly material status, and public roles. Material status of art links to capitalism. 

Photopainting in the 1960s

• "Richter painted luxury and everyday goods, images based on tourist brochures, film stills and erotica. Collaborating with Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, he called his practice ‘Capitalist Realism’, hanging his paintings in a department store and appearing as a living sculpture alongside them" p.3  
• Richter's practice is becoming very interesting. Capitalist Realism is also the title of Mark Fisher's text in which discusses Capitalism as a political structure and way of life, and how there isn't really an alternative to a money fuelled system. 
• The act of an artist copying luxury and every day goods, things that contribute to the capitalist way of living, and the societies much of the world is used to, it just a way of fuelling this capitalist desire. The fact it's innate humans to want better for themselves or want a good wage and to display their wealth, is just the way we are, maybe it's brought on by the culture we live in or maybe its in our genes. 
• The performative act of Richter here - hanging his images in a department store and then appearing as a living sculpture alongside them, is a step further and maybe a critique of capitalism. 

• "grey ‘makes no statement whatsoever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible nor invisible... Grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape.’" p.6. 
• Here Richter describes the use of the tone grey, and why he chose to use it in his Grey Paintings. I recently completed a rather grey looking abstract painting and was interested to take on board Richter's thoughts on the tone. The monochrome tone is something that I have been working with for the majority of the year, and i'm slowly moving away from it now, introducing colours to my paintings. Monochrome was also appealing to me for similar reasons - it isn't making a statement, rather the textural tones and details of either the reflective metals, or brush strokes of the paint is more apparent. 

• "One is made with rollers producing an impersonal surface off which light plays in different ways." p.6. 
• Richter states that one of his Grey Paintings is made using rollers to create this surface which light plays off. This is the exact reason I also used an ink roller in my own previous grey painting - but I didn't know that Richter had done this for this same reason. 
• This has allowed me to put into a sentence that - 'creating a surface which light plays off' is what my practice has been about for the entire year, and it is what interests me most. 

 Gerhard Richter: Text, writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961-2007 Thames and Hudson 2009

• "Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God." Notes, 1962 https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1  Gerhard Richter: Text, writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961-2007 Thames and Hudson 2009, p.14.