German artist Gerhard Richter is having his ‘Gerhard Richter Portraits’ exhibition which runs from 26 Feb to 31 May at the National Portrait Gallery.
Gerhard Richter (born Feb 9 1932, Germany) is an important artist in the 20th and 21st centuries; his work, which spans nearly five decades, is full of tension between depicted reality and the actuality of painting: process and material. From the 1950s and his time in Eastern Germany’s Dresden, the artist has been known for his photo-paintings, particularly his landscapes, and his involved abstract paintings.
In 1962 Richter began to make portraits and other works copied from found photographs. Unwilling to continue in his earlier, abstract style, and yet wary of inventing pictures based on observation and interpretation, he had been seeking instead a more direct and objective way of representing the world. Therefore, a photograph, being machine-made, was in his view ‘the most perfect picture’. Using photographs as the basis for paintings freed him from conventional artistic processes involving the creation of motifs, colour, composition and expression. Richter’s subjects vary from family members and celebrities to contemporaries and art dealers. The photos which the portraits are based on are taken from newspapers, magazines and personal albums.
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