CENTRO PECCI exhibitions

This exhibition of Gerard Richter’s works - all carried out between the mid-Sixties and the late Nineties, including also the important Atlas collection - is a unique occasion to get thoroughly the work of one of the greatest characters on the international art scene. The complexity of Richter’s art is not only equivalent to the dilemmas of our time but also to the crucial nature of the many questions that the artist has posed himself during the creation of the works which now bear the sings of his own aesthetic and existential rage. “Talk about painting: there’s no point”, wrote Richter at the beginning of his intense investigation, “By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change”, suppressing what is most important in painting and what cannot be expressed with words.

 

In addition to Atlas, (the encyclopaedic work composed of more than 600 photos, collages sketches and drawings) the exhibition presents a wide range of paintings belonging to the pictorial cycles performed by the artist from 1960 until now: portraits, nudes, cities, landscapes, mountains, clouds, greys, colour charts and abstract paintings. Atlas, is a personal collection of images “in progress”, organised in medium-size panels which include materials grouped in the form of thematic albums, such as private scenes, special and formal experiments, landscapes, seen city areas, houses, coloured cards, colour proofs, abstractions, etc. where he is constantly searching for pictorial results. In fact, from this series of images Gerhard Richter takes themes and motives for his paintings, as the numerous pictorial works, exposed in parallel to Atlas, point out.

Gerhard Richter
Dresden, Germany, 1932. He lives and works in Cologne.   He studied painting at the Dresden Art Academy from 1951 to 1956. In 1961, just a few months before the wall is... continue reading