Gerhard Richter celebrated his 80th birthday on February 9, 2012. In tribute to one of the most important artists of the present day, declared the ‘Picasso of the 21st century’ in 2004 by The Guardian, the Nationalgalerie Berlin is holding a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work. The exhibition, entitled Gerhard Richter: Panorama, is organized in conjunction with Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
The term ‘panorama’ is taken from the Greek and is formed by the combination of the words ‘all’ and ‘seeing’. In English it has come to mean an unbroken view of an entire area. In a panorama, the expanse reveals itself to the viewer as you shift your gaze over time and through space. There is no one single view, rather a series of many views that combine to form a seamless whole. Correspondingly, the exhibition on the upper floor of the Neue Nationalgalerie has been conceived as a broad cyclorama that gradually unfolds in a series of expansive, open rooms. Around 130 paintings and five sculptures, selected in close cooperation with the artist himself, provide an insight into Richter’s manifold body of work, amassed over the course of five decades.
The exhibition has a chronological structure that gives viewers a very palpable sense of the singular nature of Gerhard Richter’s work. What makes it so singular is the much-discussed contemporaneity of abstract and figurative works and the constant interplay of repetition and change, whose mechanisms are laid bare in the chronological sequence of the works on display. It was thus a very conscientious decision not to hang the works according to theme or style. Such a concept would obscure the singular nature of Richter’s work, as it would separate the stylistically and thematically disparate even when they had in fact arisen at the same time. Instead of this, the panorama that opens itself up to you presents figurative paintings alongside abstract experiments in colour, landscapes that echo old masters, sea pictures and portraits alongside town views, which, broken down into a series of gestures, are now hardly recognizable as such. Traditional vanitas motives like the candle and skull stand in immediate proximity to expressively dense and complex abstracts.
There is, however, one distinct break in the chronology: when entering the gallery, the first thing you see is not Table from 1962 ( the first painting listed in Richter’s catalogue raisonné ). Instead you are initially surrounded by the large-scale abstract squeegee paintings that characterize Richter’s most recent period. Our panorama of the artistic processes starts in the present day, before delving deeper into the past and finally reemerging in the present.
Born in Dresden in 1932, Gerhard Richter studied wall painting at the art academy in his home city and very soon began receiving his first commissions in the still nascent GDR, or East Germany. In 1959 he visited the international art fair, documenta II, in Kassel, orchestrated by Werner Haftmann. It was a decisive moment for the young artist. Abstract works by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana left a deep impression on him. Looking back at the event in 1986, Richter reflects: ‘Their sheer impudence! I was deeply fascinated and moved by it. I could almost say that these pictures were the real reason why I left the GDR. I realized that something was wrong with the way I thought.’ In spring 1961, just months before the construction of the Berlin Wall, Richter left the GDR together with his wife Ema via West Berlin and finally settled in Düsseldorf. Contrary to what one might expect, however, Richter did not fall in line with prevalent trends in the West; in fact he defied them, just as he would again later during his time as professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1971 to 1993. Richter did not embark down a similar path to the radicalism he so admired in Pollock and Fontana or in the artistic approach developed by the Fluxus movement at the time. He countered the progressive tendencies towards ‘liberating’ art with the medium of painting, a medium laden with tradition. He would remain true to painting even when pushing its boundaries to the limit. Great artists were treated with an equal degree of irreverence and respect, as seen, for instance, in Richter’s answer to Marcel Duchamp’s famous analysis of painting from 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), with his own work: Ema ( Nude on a Staircase ) from 1966.