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From: blp Category: Art Date: 08 March 2007 Time: 10:15 AM Review: The first time I ever saw Gerhard Richter's work or heard of him was in Washington DC, in a little downstairs public exhibition space (as opposed to a private gallery) not far from Capital Hill. My mum suggested going and assumed, purely since he was German, that he might be an expressionist. The place was so small that it felt like a semi-amateur show in a church crypt, unplastered brick, vaulted walls and all. I'm not sure the pictures were even hung in any conventional sense, more fixed to makeshift wooden supports against the wall and down the middle of the room. It was all photorealism, no abstracts. I thought he was sort of a naive guy who didn't realise it wasn't OK to just do copies of photos of your family on holiday or your wife walking down the stairs nude. A bit further on there were some of his paintings of candles and skulls and these seemed even more imaginatively bankrupt. I felt sorry for him, as you do when you see the work of someone who seems to have no intelligence at all and be part of no current of history. When I saw his work again a few years later, I decided he was good. Or did someone decide for me?