![]() But there is something more there, too, a hint of the theosophist’s desire to depict thoughts and emotions in visual form. One could interpret the painting as a sly parody of that era’s neo-expressionist schwarmerei. The garish palette-one friend compared it to a Trapper Keeper-seems to announce the arrival of the tacky excesses of 1980s Wall Street. Faust’s slick visual language is pulled from the world of commercial art and illustration and balanced with aspects of gestural abstraction, forming a synthetic combination of Pop art and AbEx. ![]() (The troubled financial institution has since had to sell the Richter, along with a good deal of its hoard of other fine artworks.) Faust is one of the artist’s “smooth” abstractions, made before he had fully developed his squeegee-and-trowel technique of layering and removing paint, leaving behind its striated and rough surfaces. The painter’s massive 1980 triptych Abstraktes Bild (Faust) once adorned the lobby of Deutsche Bank’s Wall Street offices. © Gerhard Richter.Īt least one of Richter’s paintings actually did occupy the lobby of a bank. Installation view, Deutsche Bank, New York, 2012. Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Faust), 1980, oil on canvas. But I have to say now there was a lot more to it than I wanted to admit. At the time, this comment seemed to me philistine, if not altogether blasphemous. My date was not moved she said the works looked like something that would be in the lobby of a bank. I viewed his monumental “squeegee paintings,” with their accretions and removals of pigment, with a reverence verging on worship: The sublime was still possible to convey in the medium of painting. At the time, I wanted to be an abstract painter, and I believed Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder were the highest accomplishments in that genre in the contemporary world. Still, it’s possible to find, in this simultaneous refusal and acceptance of the idea of a final painting, his legacy as an artist.Įleven years ago, I saw the retrospective “Gerhard Richter: Panorama” at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. This show felt more like a continuation than a conclusion of his practice. Such a flourish would feel unnatural for a painter who has made the public performance of skepticism and self-doubt his métier. Often a painter’s final works will show their style stripped down to its bare essentials, a move into monochrome, or another statement of completion, but Richter’s last abstractions, although they show subtle developments and variations from his previous work, don’t boldly declare, These are they. If one were looking for a kind of retrospective, or a coda and summation of the artist’s career, this exhibition might have disappointed: It was, in many ways, just another Richter show, which is to say it was still quite remarkable. It also contained seventy-six drawings-the products of the practice that replaced the physically arduous process of painting for Richter-and a single glass-and-steel sculpture. The show featured fourteen of his last paintings, completed in 20, made before the artist, now ninety-one, declared his retirement from painting. IN MARCH, New York’s David Zwirner opened its first solo exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s work since the painter’s defection to the megagallery from Marian Goodman, his gallerist of thirty-seven years. Gerhard Richter in his studio with Spiegel (Mirror), 1981, and Abstraktes Bild (Faust) (Abstract Painting ), 1980, Düsseldorf, 1981.
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