| Gerhard Richter opens his exhibition with a large-scale, almost monochrome painting, a painting—pale—of which underlying chromatic structures are layered with translucent veils of white paint with an occasional break on the canvas to suggest, perhaps, that even if there is nothing within nothing, there is a piercing shred of a void. Appropriately, the subtitle of the exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery New York is Voids and White: The Last Paintings Before the Last. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the author of the exhibition catalogue, correctly describes these recent abstractions of the German artist as “painterly reduction” and “extreme forms of pictorial minimization.” |  |
Harriet Zinnes
Gerhard Richter opens his exhibition with a large-scale, almost monochrome painting, a painting—pale—of which underlying chromatic structures are layered with translucent veils of white paint with an occasional break on the canvas to suggest, perhaps, that even if there is nothing within nothing, there is a piercing shred of a void. Appropriately, the subtitle of the exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery New York is Voids and White: The Last Paintings Before the Last. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the author of the exhibition catalogue, correctly describes these recent abstractions of the German artist as “painterly reduction” and “extreme forms of pictorial minimization.” This strong desire to communicate nothing to the world (even, of course, as the artist ironically works hard in his onerous overloads of white), to disengage with communication in his annihilation of color has its precedent in, for example, Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and his White on White (1918) as Buchloh notes. If color is no more, if the void is omnipresent, the body too has disappeared. To the artist such writers as Samuel Beckett and John Cage with their erosion of the communicative functions of language are comparable to his own work with his denial of color. When color is denied, there are grief and mourning. Is Richter the prophet of the postmodern world?On view is a major representation of works made by the artist from 2005 to the present, including an important new cycle of paintings titled Sindbad (2008) as well as individual paintings presenting medium- to large-format abstractions, and a new group of large-scale near-monochrome paintings. The exhibition is the most recent presentation of the artist’s work in New York since his solo exhibition at Marian Goodman in 2005. During the past two decades Richter has made several important cycles of abstract paintings. The current exhibition follows on other recent series of abstract works by Richter, including the Silicate paintings of 2003; the Cage paintings of 2006, conceived as a single coherent group and first displayed in 2007 at the 52nd Venice Biennale curated by Rob Storr; and a recent group of white abstract works exhibited at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris in 2008. A fully illustrated catalogue, Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings, 2009 is published on the occasion of the exhibition, and includes a new text by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art History at Harvard University.
In his essay, Buchloh traces the historical and aesthetic framework of Richter’s abstract paintings and considers the artist’s recent white non-representational works within the larger context of a postwar trajectory of reductivist painting in the U.S. and Europe. In the current exhibition, a continuum of production procedures can be seen to be inherent in the recent history of the artist’s abstract works. “Richter’s deployment of texture, structure, and gesture in painting deliberately suspends itself between scientific and expressive conceptions of painterly process. It is oscillating with the same deliberation, between painting as an act and painting as an accident, between composition as a result of mere chance encounters of materials and structures, and composition as the tracing of a subject’s residual intentionality,” writes Buchloh in Gerhard Richter: Large Abstracts, 2008. Of the new white paintings in particular Buchloh writes in Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings, 2009, “We should begin by noting that the white surfaces in the recent paintings do not function in the manner of tabula rasa that effaces color altogether…but rather in the manner of a palimpsest. More than mere elisions or eclipses of color, these monochromes operate with alternating and intertwining layers and lesions of paint, their partial removal a simultaneity of addition and subtraction. All of the new paintings allow residual colors to break through in minuscule quantities and in unpredictable, seemingly aleatory structures (never quite painted, never quite drawn, suspended between an intentional graphic incision or an aleatory splintering of paint and an accidentally formed ridge or edge of pigment and paste, the haphazard byproduct of an awkward brush move with various tools that have replaced the skillfully handled brush. The tools themselves—primitive wooden rulers or squeegees—perform the transition between craft and industry, and between chance and control, enacting thereby the ambiguity between artisanal competence and mechanical execution).”
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