joseph scissorhands: Gerhard Richter

Sunday, 25 February 2024

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter - 15.3.2023, 2023

“Drawing is a little like writing.… While reading we decipher it, we complete it.”
—Gerhard Richter, 1997

Some very interesting revelations in this exhibition of new and recent abstract works by artist Gerhard Richter. I had seen the room at Tate Modern devoted to his large Abstrakt Bild canvases and wasn't particularly taken by them. There was something about his practice and method that just didn't move me. To see the smaller scale works on display here at David Zwirner was like seeing Richter's work anew through fresh eyes. The small coloured paper collages were just beautiful, like little shards of pure jewel-like colour exploding in their frames. They reminded me of more chromatic (razzle) dazzle patterns like those employed as camouflage on military vehicles in WWII which were the inspiration for my own Dazzle collages (here). They contain the very same spirit of Matisse in his own colourful late period papier collés employed as his chosen mode of expression when illness rendered him unable to paint at the easel. I also admired the way in which Richter made no attempt to hide the messiness that comes with the technique of working with collage, leaving visible the traces and spills of glue and refusing to try to disguise this integral aspect/shortcoming of the collaging process. These collages display Richter's interest in the theories of composer John Cage and Dadaist Jean (Hans) Arp's "chance collages". These collages really excited me and were an aspect of Richter's work that I was previously unaware of. Their flat planes of pure unbroken colour stood out from the textured impastos and curdled/marbled surfaces of the paintings also on display here, as well as the nuanced tonal work of the drawings. The small marbled lacquer-behind-glass paintings of 2010 are derived from the famous folk tales in One Thousand and One Nights and made by pouring paint onto plexiglass sheets and then pressing this onto glass. Again I liked the intimacy of scale of these works. Of the larger abstracts I admired the piece with different hues of green, very reminiscent of Monet's Waterlily series, but again wasn't moved by the other larger paintings. A large piece that did move me however was the vast, stripey, digital print entitled Strip which had a wonderful metallic gloss surface and is very reminiscent of the works of Bridget Riley. There are as previously mentioned many drawings here too, exercises in line and tone, and others dreamy puddles of delicate wet-in-wet watercolour. It was a real treat to visit this exhibition of a more organic kind of abstraction immediately after that of the mostly hard-edged, visually dazzling geometric abstractions featured in the exhibition Counterpoint at Cristea Roberts Gallery which I recorded on this platform very recently (here).