Gerhard Richter prints

Exactly 20 years ago I hurried to London to see a retrospective exhibition of paintings made by Gerhard Richter between 1962 and 1991. Yesterday I went to London by train to see the newest retrospective exhibition. The first exhibition was at the Tate Gallery and I went by boat (the Jetfoil). Some months later I finished my Art History studies at the VUB with a text on the German painter. Ninety pages painfully typed on a typewriter. The text was (luckily) never published and is buried somewhere in the archives of the university.

The current show is at the Tate Modern. This article is only a few paragraphs, typed on a powerful computer and published almost immediately online. I am an artist now, I don’t do text anymore. So I don’t think I can add anything else to all the texts and interviews and opinions about Gerhard Richter. Just go, see and enjoy the works. Even if you think you already know what Richter is about. If your are honest, and you love art, and you love painting you have to go. It is a major event.

Be sure to watch the new film ‘Gerhard Richter Painting’ by Corinna Belz. (available on DVD) You will be watching Richter at work in his large studios. You will understand why these abstract paintings are so amazing. You will see also a very funny and sensitive painter, artist. There is nothing hard to understand about his work. It is painting, just painting. The sound of the squeegee will hypnotize you. The film also gives a good insight look at the art world behind a great artist like Richter. It is a serious film about art that will make you smile.

The really recent works by Richter were not in London. I saw some of those small works behind glass at a recent show in Köln. (2008-2009, Museum Ludwig). But I was most curious to see the recent ‘Strips’ (see Marian Goodman Gallery). Those are digital prints mounted between aluminum and perspex (diasec).  Gerhard Richter is doing digital prints and presenting them as paintings! The catalogue includes a serious essay by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh  (Painting progress, painting loss).

For me it is a liberating thing to see especially a great painter like Richter finally use the computer as a tool and produce digital prints! I hope this will help people to understand that fine prints are works of art too. For Gerhard Richter, ‘painting’ (working with paint) is a different form of thinking. You can not translate or reduce that to a theory or in a text. I think the same is true when (I am) working with (my) computer and producing digital works of art.

With the ‘Strips’ Richter is only discovering what will be possible. I do not know if he has the technical ability to really understand the possibilities of a computer. After all he is a painter. He learned how to work in an extraordinary way with paint and to produce amazing works of art through painting. Lots of the ideas and methods he works with can be translated and expanded into a digital practice. But this means he will have to learn to think digitally and stop thinking in paint. Probably he might need the assistance of some computer wizards next to his current assistants preparing so meticulously his paint.