Gerhard Richter: The Power of Images

Gerhard Richter - Cathedral Corner - 1987 - Oil on canvas - 48 1/16" x 34 1/4" (122 x 87 cm) - Private Collection, New York (click photo for larger image)Gerhard Richter (born 1932) is a German visual artist, who has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. Originally trained in a realist style, he later developed an appreciation for the more progressive work of his American and European contemporaries.

Richter has maintained a lifelong fascination for the power of images and painting's long, uneasy relationship with photography: while either medium may claim to reflect or express reality truthfully, either ultimately suggests only a partial, or incomplete view of a subject.

Richter borrows much of his painted imagery from newspapers, or even his own family albums. Often he begins by mechanically projecting such an image onto the canvas, a technique for thinking about how images often seem to have a life of their own, like mysterious ghosts haunting our psyche. This act of visual compression, in which photography, projection, and painting merge to make a finished art work, suggests that all vision is a kind of conversion of the "real" into the “imaginary." Richter often blurs his subjects and embraces chance effects in his own painting process, in order to show the impossibility of any artist conveying the full truth of a subject in its original condition.