Gerhard Richter: 100 Pictures
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Gerhard Richter: 100 Pictures Details
Amazon.com Review Having the lovely and intimate volume Gerhard Richter: 100 Pictures in your hands is like being transported to the renowned painter's exhibition at the Carré d'Art in Nîmes. The beautifully produced book presents paintings from 1995 to 1996, an incredibly prolific time for Richter. The luscious images range from colorful abstractions with scraped and textured paint to his signature realist paintings based on photographs. A charming essay by Guy Tosatto offers a poetic explanation of Richter's work. The telling of a conversation between a mother and her whip-smart son mimics the series of mother and child paintings. Tosatto's characters discuss the nature of painting and illusion, while the portraits of Richter's wife and young child emerge in various degrees of clarity. The domestic theme continues with a number of flower paintings, including two almost identical paintings of yellow tulips, one blurry and one almost in focus, and a portrait of soft pink flowers with broken stems. --J.P. Cohen Read more About the Author Born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, Gerhard Richter grew up under National Socialism and lived for 16 years under East German Communism before moving to West Germany in 1961. In the heady artistic milieu of Cologne and Dusseldorf in the 1960s, Richter discovered Art Informel, Neo-Dada, and Fluxus, and, together with Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, briefly formed a satirical variant of Pop called "Capitalist Realism." Since then, he has emerged as one of the essential painters of the postwar period, pioneering realism with paintings made from photographs. His work has also profoundly engaged with Neo-Expressinism and Abstract Art. Curator and art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist was born in Zurich in 1968. Some of the well-regarded exhibitions he has organized include many collaborations with the Museum in Progress in Vienna and the ongoing project "Migrations", at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Read more
Reviews
Americans, unless you were lucky enough to see the Gerhard Richter retrospective that toured American museums a few years ago, this book may be your best opportunity to get acquainted with one of the best German painters of recent decades. The book was published in conjunction with an exhibit of Richter's "private paintings" in Nimes, France. Most of the paintings were done in an intense burst of creativity in 1995-1996. These paintings are chiefly abstracts, done in a bouquet of fragant colors. To my eyes, Richter's abstracts are a revelation of serene painterly beauty in a genre - abstract expressionism - that has more often revealed bizarre turmoil and depression. If I were to buy an abstract for my parlor wall, I'd hope to afford a Richter.Richter didn't paint abstractions only because he had no recourse to realism and old-masterly brushwork. A number of the plates in this book show his competence at photo-like realism and Degas-like impressionism; the choice of style was his, according to the perceived subject.Richter himself collaborated on the production of this book. The pages are small - roughly 7'x10' - but the quality of ink and paper is very high, and the colors are as vibrant as the originals. Gerhard Richter is a painter whose art will be around for a long time, and with luck you'll get to see it in the museum nearest your home sometime, but you won't go wrong by getting a preview of it from this splendid volume.
