格哈德·里希特

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York 
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
Dominique Lévy Fine Art, New York
Private Collection, USA

Nîmes, Carré d'Art, Museé d'Art Contemporain de la ville de Nîmes, Gerhard Richter, 100 Bilder, June – September 1996, cat. no. 790-5, pp. 139-140 (text) and p. 49, illustrated in color
Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Åpent Rom - Utvalgte Verk fra Samlingen, May - September 1997
Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Gerhard Richter: det umuliges kunst, malerier 1964–1998, January – April 1999, pp. 95-96, illustrated in color
Prato, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Gerhard Richter, October 1999 – January 2000, p. 135, illustrated in color
Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Museum-Sommerutstillingen 2000, June - September 2000, no. 5
Columbus, Ohio, Wexner Center for the Arts, As Painting: Division and Displacement, May – August 2001, cat. no. 79, p. 47, illustrated in color and p.145, illustrated
New York, The Museum of Modern Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;  Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, February 2002 – May 2003, p. 79 (text) and p. 242, illustrated in color
London, National Portrait Gallery, Gerhard Richter: Portraits, February – May 2009, pp. 120 and 171 (text) and p. 136, illustrated in color

Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter: A Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, cat. no. 790-5, illustrated in color
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: Maler, Cologne, 2002, pp. 168, 258 and 411 (text) and p. 410, illustrated in color
Robert Storr, Doubt and Belief in Painting, New York, 2003, p. 136 (text) and p. 128, illustrated in color
Erik Verhagen, ‘Bête comme un peintre. Les portraits de famille de Gerhard Richter,’ Les Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, no. 90, Winter 2004-2005, p. 53, illustrated
Bruno Eble, Gerhard Richter: La surface du regard, Paris, 2006, pp. 119-121 (text)
Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, The Painting of Modern Life, 2007, pp. 39-40 (text)
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter, Maler, Cologne, 2008, 2nd edition, p. 362, illustrated in color
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago and London, 2009, p. 326, illustrated in color
Jennifer Higgie, 'Alone Again, Or: The persistent and enigmatic subject of women turning away,' Frieze, Summer 2009, p. 160, illustrated in color
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter, Paris, 2010, p. 281, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is not framed.
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Titled after Richter’s second wife Isa Genzken, with whom he was just ending a tumultuous relationship, the ambiguous and haunting I. G. from 1993 address the question of biography within the classic portraiture genre; in this case, the private and complex rapport between the painter and his subject. At the same time, they also pose the crucial question concerning the legitimacy of painting in the contemporary world that hovers over Richter’s entire artistic career.  As the subject turns away, subsumed in an ambiguous space, we are denied access to her world, yet we are mesmerized by these paradoxical images that are intimate yet inscrutable. Richter has brought us to the point he continuously interrogates: what kind of reality is knowable and how can one still use tradition-laden oil and canvas to access it? As Robert Storr eloquently observes, “Facing away from us in both paintings, she is as inaccessible as she is exposed, as lost in her own reality as she is vulnerable to the objective gaze of the camera that captured her likeness and the reticent but hardly objective hand that transcribed it onto canvas. Here, the very detachment Richter assumes becomes the inverse sign of emotion, of a distance between two people that is not just aesthetically imposed but rather the expression of two solitudes.” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, and travelling, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 2002-03, p. 79)

In his interrogation of the nature of painting, Richter was one of the first to explore the profound ambiguity in the interaction between painting and photography and the I.G. series of five canvases is typical of the challenge to categorize the artist’s work: photo-realist painting or portraiture, parody of family snap-shot or nostalgia for Romanticism? The allure of the series lies precisely in its ambiguity in genre and in the powerful personal undercurrents of the subject. Richter revered Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, and in the present work, the tranquil dexterity of the painterly surface and the cross-like composition of Isa’s stretched arms against the austere background flirt with historical painting genre while the title clearly points to portraiture. Yet with its contrast between singularly focused realism and grisailles-suffused abstraction, I.G. straddles the genres of paint and camera, just as Richter has done across his wildly diverse portfolio, beginning with his Photo Paintings of the 1960s when he started sourcing images from newspapers, magazines and snapshots, rendering them in cool, painted monochrome. When Richter entered the art scene in Düsseldorf in the early 1960s, the traditional medium of art was in dissolution, but perhaps due to his academic training at the Dresden Academy in East Germany, Richter retained fundamental confidence in art amid the widespread disillusionment about painting, and in photography, he located the point of departure for his paintings. The artist adheres to the maxim that: “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) To paint from a photograph, for Richter, is to eliminate the expressionist gesture and editorial judgment inherent to a painting from life.

“Appearance, semblance”, Richter observed, “is the theme of my life. All that is, seems and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible.” (cited in Exh. Cat., London, National Portrait Gallery, Gerhard Richter Portraits, London 2009, p.9) Appearance, he seems to be saying, is all that can be known. By rendering a photo onto a canvas, and adding on his signatory process of “soft-focus” blurring and minute tonal gradient across the canvas to create a vision not quite consonant with actual ocular experience, Richter invites us to contemplate the realness of the picture itself rather than the inaccessible reality behind it. So, rather than projecting an emotional truth onto canvas like Pollock, or critiquing a certain ideological truth like Warhol, Richter chooses to take on the age-old philosophical question of what can be seen, rendering visible what curator Robert Storr calls the “iconography of the everyday”. (Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Op. Cit., 2002, p.36)  It is precisely within this philosophical conviction that Richter came into full power as a virtuoso in oils.

Since 1966, the artist has been painting from his own photographs, marking a significant shift away from his previous impersonal and dispassionate art to produce more intimate works of which I.G. is an extraordinary example. In one canvas, Isa’s head is lowered and her left hand is stretched out as if she is pushing something outside the frame. In the other, her arms hang down and her head is tilted slightly indicating imminent movement. In both pictures, Isa’s pale shoulders and close-cropped black hair set up a sharp tonal contrast, echoing the tension between her shadows and the gray and dark green of the background. The black border on the bottom implies the frame of a photographic print, flattening the spatial depth and pushing Isa infinitely closer to the background. She has become an abstraction, denying what’s behind her, pushing away what is near her, and moving forward into a world of her own. It is hard not to read it as an ominous coda to their marriage, an inevitable escape or Richter’s failed last attempt to hold her back. Among five works in the I.G. series, Robert Storr calls the present two “the most striking and the most severe in the series” (Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting,New York, 2003, p.136)

The ambiguity between holding back and turning away, between distance and intimacy, is quite ubiquitous across the artist’s portraits. Dated one year later than I.G., The Reader, a portrait of Sabine, whom Richter would marry in 1995, evinces the same contradictions. More than with I. G., we can almost enter into the image, almost as if one can read over Sabine’s shoulder, yet she is so absorbed in her reading within a gauzy spatiality and light that we are kept separate. The art historical tradition of artists’ portraits of their wives and lovers are precedents for this delicate dance of closeness and distance. The 17th century painter Rembrandt excelled in coaxing intimacy out of the effects of light on the figure in his paintings of his lover Hendrickje Stoffels, in works such as Woman Bathing in a Stream. The timeless mystery of Rembrandt’s painting, echoing I.G.’s enduring powers, lies in its ambiguity of genre and the underlying personal relationship. The sumptuous robe suggests a biblical or historical painting while the obscure backdrop and the quotidian activity point to a personal portrait; the exposed skin suggests eroticism under the patriarchal male gaze while the woman’s gaze at her own reflection indicates a fully self-sufficient individual. Rembrandt has captured his lover as both real and ideal, just as Isa’s figure in I.G., is poised at the transient moment of departure and lingering, of concreteness and abstraction.

Another poignant comparison can be drawn between I.G. and the late 19th century painter Ferdinand Hodler’s Portrait of Berthe Jacques, Wife of the Artist. Throughout the late 1890s, the artist painted a series of portraits of his wife whose health was deteriorating. Hodler’s wife also faces away from our view but that ambiguous moment of turning back or turning away is an appropriate portrait for not only an individual loved by the painter, but also a meditation on mortality. Richter invites the viewer to reflect on these themes in I.G.: “I am fascinated by the human, temporal, real, logical side of an occurrence which is simultaneously so unreal, so incomprehensible and so atemporal. And I would like to represent it in such a way that this contradiction is preserved.” (cited in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter, the Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, London, 1995, p.58)  A virtuoso in oils both in addressing painterly traditions and exploring new mediums and methods, Richter has left an indelible mark in art history and re-established painting’s ability to communicate the very fundamental question of art:  painting can still help us see.