Gerhard Richter

Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich
Metzeler Collection, Düsseldorf
Galerie Reckermann, Cologne
Galerie Thomas Borgmann, Cologne
Private Collection, New Jersey
Hauser & Wirth, Zürich
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1994

Cologne, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Verlagshaus DuMont, Demonstrative, 1967
Düsseldorf, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Gerhard Richter. Arbeiten 1962 bis 1971, 1971, n.p., illustrated

Exhibition Catalogue, Aachen, Kunstverein Gegenverkehr, Gerhard Richter, 1969, n.p., no. 56, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, German Pavillion, XXXVI Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte, Gerhard Richter, 1972, p. 48, no. 167-1, illustrated
Jürgen Harten, Ed., Gerhard Richter: Paintings 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, n.p., no. 167-1
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, n.p., no. 167-1, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is much cooler and the white border tends more towards pale grey. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is minor rubbing with associated small losses to the extreme tip of the top left corner. Close inspection reveals a pinsized loss towards the centre above the Antlers, and two very minor hairline diagonal cracks and a minute flyspot in the upper half of the top right quadrant, and a very thin vertical drip mark towards the centre of the lower right quadrant. There is a faint horizontal stretcher bar mark to the left centre. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals four very small spots of restoration in the upper part of the top right quadrant.
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Extraordinary in its scale and exemplifying Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking Photo-Painting technique, Geweih is an early demonstration of the artist's sensational painterly technique and historically significant approach to source material. Frequently and justly cited as the greatest painter of this era, Richter has committed the fifty years of his extraordinary career to interrogating the nature of perception. The years between 1965 and 1970 saw Richter at the beginning of this experimentation and with Geweih he consolidates previous advancements and furthers the fundamental relationship between painting and photography that has marked his epic corpus ever since. Indeed, the source image of antlers used here belongs to sheet 10 of Richter's Atlas, which also provided the source imagery for such illustrious paintings as Bombers of 1963, housed in the Wolfsburg Städtische Galerie, and Motor Boat of 1965, now in the Basel Kunstmuseum.

Executed at the height of his mature development of the monochrome Photo-Paintings, Geweih evidences the full force of Richter's masterful painterly technique. Emerging from ethereal, mist-like veils, the composition has been subtly blurred by the artist's meticulous feathering of the wet paint surface with a fine dry brush to inscribe hundreds of diagonal furrows in a consummate exhibition of sfumato brushwork. This standardised and impersonal treatment results in a surface regulation that aptly serves the underlying conceptual objectivity of the Photo-Painting project. At the same time, Richter's tonal variation eradicates outline but emphasises contour, thereby constantly manipulating the spectator's focus. Indeed, the portrayal of light across the scene lends a sculptural quality to the antlers, which loom towards the viewer seemingly in three-dimensions. Furthermore, the diaphanous paint layers lend an ephemeral quality to the painting, its imagery becoming like a visual cue for some half-forgotten memory. Catching the transient glimpse of a fleeting moment, this technique also imitates the effect of movement itself. Richter confronts the viewer not only with the manipulation of paint, but also the manipulation of perception.

Richter had begun his series of Photo-Paintings in the early 1960s, appropriating images he found from newspapers, books and other sources and recasting them as grisaille paintings in black, grey and white. A one-time dark-room assistant and a lifelong photographer himself, from the outset he has been not a painter of nature, but rather a painter of photographs. With a self-conscious combination of dispassionate assessment and subjective editorship, Richter analyses this image dependent upon aperture exposure and shutter speed that captures a subject in a fixed in a moment of time. Studying his subject as relayed through the photographic lens his Photo-Paintings posit key questions about visual cognition.

Just as the Old Masters used sketches and the camera obscura, or the nineteenth-century Romanticists worked from small plein air nature studies, Richter enlarges the amateur photograph from snapshot to grand scale. Indeed, the 1.8 metre Geweih elevates the small newspaper clipping to the scale of an epic History painting. Rather like Sigmar Polke's iconic raster-bild technique, through enlargement Richter exaggerates the faults in the photographic medium, exposing its inadequacies as mechanical shorthand for the act of looking. It is precisely this self-conscious pairing of photography with painterly illusionism that defines the artist's relationship to his historical predecessors. Richter dispels the Romantic conception of his subject as a manifestation of sublime Nature, pointing instead to the chemical and mechanical processes of photography. By replicating the effects of photography - such as arbitrary cropping and the blur of an unsteady hand - Richter creates tension between the remote, mechanical effects of the contemporary medium and the heroic treatment he invests in his subject.

Of course, in addition to the antlers as subject there is the foundational skull of these magnificent horns. Employing such a simple yet powerful motif, Richter confronts the monolith of tradition head on. Highly significant is the idea of a skull as a vanitas symbol, which alludes to the fragility and mortality of life. The skull has acted throughout hundreds of years as a memento mori; as the material vestige of life it symbolises the brevity of existence. This universal symbol carries traditional associations in most cultural histories, and although Richter references this precedent to a degree, his work offers very much more than purely esoteric and exclusive semiotics. Rooted in the snapshot of a frozen instant of time and the deliberately objective rendition of a light-sensitive negative, Geweih recasts the momento mori as a striking and fully evolved essay in painted photography.

Geweih is also a cerebral response to the cultural climate of Western Europe in the mid 1960s and provides incisive parallels with the contemporaneous Pop pioneers Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein. Taking as a starting point the agents of mass media, the Photo-Paintings also critique methods of information supply and demand in an increasingly globalized world. With Geweih Richter has edited out the explanatory text beneath the source photograph, which describes the trophy antlers in technical hunting terminology, and thus keeps the subject of his painting more subjective and visual. However, he does include a white border around the central image, slightly thicker at the bottom, in the style of a print media reproduction or picture-postcard and thereby makes clear that this is not purely a painting of a domestic interior scene. By modifying scale and focus, Geweih references and subverts mediums of popular culture that were becoming so important to the development of society at that time, thus echoing the iconic work of Warhol, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein.

Gerhard Richter's naming of Geweih is typical of this great artist's insistence on purely descriptive and exact titles. Always unfailingly accurate, the designations he selects serve as empirical labels. They detail the truth of his paintings - nothing more and nothing less - because the truth needs no further explanation, no promotion, and no excuse. This is a historic work near the beginning of one of the Twentieth Century's greatest artistic undertakings. Soon after this Richter began to expand his painterly spectrum and work in a number of different styles and begin what has become to be considered the ultimate Post Modern painterly project. Stemming from figurative works like Geweih in the Photo-Paintings, he moved to the semi-figurative, such as the series of Stadtbild, to the constructivist (Shadow paintings, Corrugated Iron) to the minimalist (Colour Charts) and pure abstract paintings. Geweih sits at the head of this incredible journey and is thus a highly significant museum-quality painting.