Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter

is a German visual artist and one of the pioneers of the New European Painting that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. His art follows the examples of Picassoand Jean Arp in undermining the concept of the artist's obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Richter

I find a lot of these don’t really add to the picture, a lot of them look like he has defaced the picture, I have an idea to paint over certain parts of the scenes to add texture and saturated colour.

I especially like the top one as the texture and strong black lines striking through the red capture my eye immediately, these colours complement the dark colours in the photograph and create a sense of drama against the natural picture of a mother holding her baby.

I think this image is really strong as we can barely see any of the photograph, the paint is pretty much all black and white, maybe a touch of blue, creating a very high contrast. The flow of the paint is reminiscent of snow on a mountain punctuated by trees and rocks. This image works for me as it captures my imagination and makes me remember times that I have spend in the Highlands.

Just some of page 4 from his work on over painted photographs from rural landscapes!

He has so much work on his website it is hard to know what to look at, he even has a search function on his website. Im not sure if this is a good thing or not, I think if I had dont this much work, people would have trouble finding it, but I guess he is such a big name that people will search hard for the piece they want

Richter has stated that the use of photographic imagery as a starting point for his early paintings resulted from an attempt to escape the complicated process of deciding what to paint, along with the critical and theoretical implications accompanying such decisions within the context of a modernist discourse. To achieve this, Richter began amassing photos from magazines, books, etc., many of which became the subject matter of his early photography-based paintings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Richter

German painter. In the early 1960s Richter was exposed to both American and British Pop art, which was just becoming known in Europe, and to the Fluxus movement. Richter consistently regarded himself simply as a painter. He began to paint enlarged copies of black-and-white photographs using only a range of greys.

The evident reliance on a ready-made source gave Richter's paintings an apparent objectivity that he felt was lacking in abstract art of the period. The indistinctness of the images that emerged in the course of their transformation into thick layers of oil paint helped free them of traditional associations and meaning. Richter concentrated exclusively on the process of applying paint to the surface..

As early as 1966 he had made paintings based on colour charts. Although these paintings, like those based on photographs, were still dependent on an existing artefact, all that was left in them was the naked physical presence of colour as the essential material of all painting.

All vestiges of subject-matter seem to have been abandoned by Richter in the paintings that he began to produce in 1976. Even these supposedly wholly invented paintings retained a second-hand look, as if the brushstrokes had been copied from photographic enlargements.

The extreme variety of Richter's work left him open to criticism, but his rejection of an artificially maintained consistency of style was a conscious conceptual act that allowed him to investigate freely the basic principles of painting.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gerhard-richter-1841