Gerhard Richter

Galleria Pieroni, Rome

Anon., 'Gerhard Richter. Abstrakte Bilder.' in, Domus, March 1982, p. 71, illustrated in colour
Jürgen Harten, Ed., Gerhard Richter: Paintings 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, p. 241, no. 469-2, illustrated
Dave Hickey, 'Richter in Tahiti' in, Parkett, no. 35, 1993, p. 83, illustrated
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, no. 469-2, illustrated in colour

"If the Abstract Pictures show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning...though these pictures are motivated by the dream of classical order and a pristine world - by nostalgia, in other words - the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality." (Gerhard Richter, 'Notes 1981', The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, pp. 98-99).

Nature in the form of landscape has been a recurrent theme in the work of Gerhard Richter throughout his career. Painted in 1981, Berg stands as one of his most accomplished paintings in this genre and bridges the gap between his figurative and abstract sensibilities. In Gerhard Richter's highly important post modern painterly project, the deconstruction of style has played a central role. In a world where mass media has completely fragmented our cultural context and there is no longer a distinct singular point of view, Richter's oeuvre has attempted to come to terms with the wealth of stylistic opportunities available to a painter and to comprehend their overlaps. With its long established history in the wider cultural lexicon, landscape painting has been a consistent point of reference for Richter. From early times when some of the greatest adventurers were the painters who attempted to seek out new views and miraculous sites around the undiscovered world to the German Romantic painters who sought a higher spiritual place in the invented nature to the likes of Turner, Cezanne and Monet who began to find chromatic and formal beauty in their direct experience of nature, landscape painting has constantly evolved throughout history.

Richter's relationship with landscape painting is a consistent lifeblood throughout his painterly oeuvre. Beginning with his seventh documented painting, Hirsch, from 1963 right up to Seestuck, the last painting in his most recent major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002, one can trace his systematic investigation into the very nature of this style. Together with Hirsch, the Gebirge series of 1968, which was the first series of Mountain paintings Richter made, sought to draw abstract correlations between the found photographic reference and its painted counterpart. These compositions were much more gestural and playful within the painterly vocabularies he was using and leaned more towards the abstract than the figurative. However following his adoption of pure abstraction from the late 1960s onwards, Richter's comprehension and adaptation of this language became much more confident and adept.

Executed over a decade later, Berg is arguably the strongest of a suite of six paintings of mountain landscapes which Richter made in 1981. In that year he made no other figurative paintings, the rest were all pure abstracts. However here an outstandingly photo-real painting is completely transformed up close by Richter's incredible manipulation of paint. The clouds which seem to drift across the lower half of the painting suddenly appear as if they are the underlayers of paint, the foreground disappears to the back. The beautiful sense of perspective in the trails of snow on the peak suddenly becomes a deft piece of tachisme.

Berg looks to the tradition of German Romanticism, explicitly to the work of Caspar David Friedrich, and challenges the movement's sacred adoration of the profane by seeking to realign the landscape as a motif within its broader social context today. This he does by painting from photographs of landscapes rather than studying from nature directly - an act which itself denounces the idea of a unique, quasi-religious encounter with nature as celebrated by Friedrich. His vast, contemplative canvases of snow-capped peaks relied on the manipulation and invention of subject matter and idealised scenery being conjured out of the artist's imagination. However, Richter accurately recorded the visual information in Berg from a photograph, thus bypassing the diversions of subjective interpretation. Fifteen years earlier he had written: "The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source" (Gerhard Richter, 'Notes, 1964-1965', The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London 1995, p. 31). Like Richter's grey-tone Photo Paintings of the 1960s, which took their subjects from poorly reproduced, grainy images he found in family albums, local German newspapers and magazines, the photographs that inspire his landscapes often reveal a deliberate insignificance and lack of self-sufficiency. Although sharing a similar provenance in nature, Richter's landscape paintings display a fundamental conceptual difference from the artistic intentions of his German Romantic forebears. They do not suggest anything of the transcendental or religious, but rather overtly expose and seek to undermine their photographic and highly un-Romantic source.

Berg is not a painting of a mountain but a painting of a photograph, and it is through Richter's masterful handling of paint that the banal is elevated to the sublime and painting reigns supreme. Richter breathes life into the lifeless source image by expertly enlivening it with minute variances of colour. From the purple pinks of the centre left to the blue turquoise films of the upper right, the semblance of hues work together as a symphonic whole, perpetually resonating in shimmering equilibrium. The serenity of the mist-enshrouded mountain is supremely balanced by the tranquil dexterity of its painted execution. The ethereal, atmospheric cloud sweeps across the canvas in soft grisaille suffusions and minutiae tonal adjustments that constantly manipulate focus and draw the viewer's gaze towards the heroic peak which stands dramatically framed at the canvas' centre. The high-altitude atmosphere emanates luminescence without referencing a specific source or direction of light, resulting is a mesmeric and vaguely hypnotic twilight. Neither dawn nor dusk but rather a glowing semi-darkness, the mysterious mood is further heightened by the inconsistencies of photographic focus which Richter transforms with flurries of sfumato brushwork that drift in and out of the flat translucent sheen of the surface.

As a late twentieth-century response to beautified landscape, Berg confronts the canonical traditions of German Romanticism. Correspondent to this key attitude, Berg consequently summarizes an intellectualised investigation into perception, asking how different presentations relate to different realities. As the painting of a romanticised photograph, Berg becomes the late twentieth-century exegesis to the invented excesses of nineteenth-century Romantic artists. While engaging their seductive aesthetic, this landscape portrait contributes to a historically significant, post-modern ethic advanced out of the satires and cultural subversions of Pop and Photorealism.