http://featherblend-grandarttours.blogspot.com/2011/11/gerhard-richter-panorama-tate-modern.html"For Baudelaire Manet was the painter of modern life, for me Richter is the painter of modern life"*
I don't think I would say Richter is my painter of modern life but I would say his masterful manipulation of paint and image says a lot about the development of visual culture since the 19th century. Artists in the late 19th century such as Degas and Manet started using the influence of photography in their work but Richter uses the photograph as subject matter or at least as what you could call source material. Using photographs from magazines and newspapers or photographers he had taken himself, Richter has used them to create slick photorealistic paintings which seem almost absent of any brush work. He also famously recreates photographic blurring in his paintings with gentle, wispy strokes across the surface of the picture. The blurring becomes more prevalent throughout the exhibition as the signature painting technique. It evolves into large scale abstract paintings which have been pushed and pulled by a large squeegee to create obliterated surfaces bleeding in and out of each other. In places these seemingly different visual concerns are dynamic and energetic but they are also disconnected and block the viewers’ visual flow. This exhibition seems to want to unify Richter's output into a cohesive train of thought but I felt that it was visually divergent and created two separate halves to the show.
An example of where Richter’s different techniques work well together is in the corner of room 3. Entitled Damaged Landscapes, room 3 contains a series of landscapes which use a wide range of applications to depict lonely and desolate environments. The smooth, flatness of Seascape (cloudy) 1969 jostles for position in the corner with the rough, jagged Himalaya 1968. Standing between these two paintings produced a buzzing visual sensation. Looking back and forth at their obvious differences stimulated a pleasure of compatible contrast. Unlike the dislocation between the gigantic abstract and the intimate photorealistic elsewhere in the show, these two hung perfectly as antidotes to each other. They seemed to answer each other. Hard with soft, forcefulness with gentleness and grandeur with intimacy. They share values of monumentality but differ enough to keep it surprising. The short, flat white brush marks of the Himalayan snow against the silhouetted peaks and ridges of a hard edged, dominating mountain contrast sharply with the soft and warm underbelly of an encroaching storm cloud in Seascape (cloudy). The eye enjoyed searching through the expanse of flat subtle tonal and temperature shifting in the Seascape cloud and trying to find the line where these subtleties changed only to be constantly thwarted. The anecdote to this optical illusion came with the bold, brash and cutting forms of the Himalayan mountain. They both offered visual relief from one another but kept the visual stimulus perpetual. Seascape (cloudy) reminds me of the subtle tonal depth of Yves Tanguy's Azure Day. Unlike Tanguy's gradual recession into space, Richter's precise move between warm yellow, orange with cold blue and grey challenges the eye to see the interplay of light through a cloud on a flat surface. The short, flat globulous brush strokes of Himalaya reminds me of George Braque's cubist paintings. Short, sharp deliberate brush strokes building up geometric faces and edgy surfaces.
“I suppose what Richter does is have a kind of counter point in his work between one way of working and another and another and another. I have a feeling he will go on working and go on working in ways that seem oppositional to each-other”* I felt that the divergent painting styles and choice of random imagery reflects the artists freedom at being able to paint what he wants. Like Manet his paintings are masterly constructions of images made up to produce an overall picture which he is satisfied with. In Seascape (sea sea) Richter has manipulated two photographs by flipping one 180 degrees Photoshop style, above the other to create an uneasy vortex where the two seascapes converge. I think the fact that he often leaves source images and unfinished paintings for a long period of time before returning to them shows that he deliberately distances himself in order to focus objectively on the aesthetics. We are told the images he has chosen have personal significance which may be the case but he treats them all the same and includes paintings of himself, family and contemporary events with seemingly unrelated mass media images and abstracts. For instance he produced a series of paintings depicting photographs of the Baader Meinhoff group some ten years after the actual event. This may have been a very human way of emotionally coming to terms with something very traumatic but it may have also been an opportunistic way to pick an opportune moment in the social climate to present these works and a way to treat them unemotionally. They are sentimental in the way only an mass media image can be sentimental, like a postcard, but they lacked sincerity. This variety is testament to his consistent concern with the image.
“I don't believe in the reality of painting, so I use different styles like clothes: it's a way to disguise myself.”*
Towards the end of the exhibition the photorealistic pictures become less startling and image choice becomes more random and less connected leaving each room fragmented. In the end I don't trust him and that is testament to his technical ability.
* Nicholas Serota July 2011
*Adrien Searle, the Guardian 12 October 2011
*Interview with Bruce Ferguson and Jeffrey Spalding, 1978