Art Styles & Periods, Types of Art, European Art

Gerhard Richter: Portraits

Name: Gerhard Richter: Portraits
Author: Gerhard Richter
ISBN: 9783775717250

by Gerhard Richter, Hubertus Butin

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Overview

This first comprehensive overview of the place of the portrait in Gerhard Richterís oeuvre assembles portrait paintings, photographs, watercolors, drawings and prints from the 1960s to the present--everything from classics like the strikingly honey-haired Betty to previously unknown works discovered in the course of research for this project. Icons such as Ema (Nude on a Staircase), Uncle Rudi, Mister Heyde, 48 Portraits, Self-Portrait, Family at the Sea, Small Bathers, Reader and Moritz, settle once and for all that Richterís emotional pull towards his material (ìThe subject matter is so important to me that I invest much time and effort in my search for it, so much that I just have to paint it.î) not only doesnít hinder him from producing classics, but rather encourages it. Stefan Gronertís essay follows the development of the portrait in the artistís work, starting with the blurred black-and-white pictures of the 1960s and moving on to the colorful panels of recent years, while Hubertus Butin devotes his essay to Richterís portrait photography of the 1960s. Portraits demonstrates that Richter pursues the theme of the portrait in not only all of the media in which he works, but in every genre as well.

Synopsis

Essays by Stefan Gronert and Hubertus Butin.

About the Author, Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany. Since the early 1960s he has emerged as one of the essential painters of the postwar period, pioneering photorealism with paintings made from found photographs (amateur snapshots, advertisements and book and magazine illustrations) and then from his own photographs. His work has also profoundly engaged with and influenced such genres as Pop and abstract art. A retrospective of Richter's work was shown in 2001 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition was one of the largest ever organized there for a living artist, and traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.