Gerhard Richter doesn't set out to make it easy for the viewer, but in a good way, writes Art Critic Aidan Dunne
The most substantial exhibition of the work of Gerhard Richter that we have seen so far in Ireland is Survey at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork (there was a solo show in the Douglas Hyde in the early 1990s). Perhaps appropriately, then, it is not so much a full-scale survey show as a kind of Richter primer, a compact introduction to what can come across as a bewilderingly heterogeneous body of work.
There's an Aki Kaurismäki film in which an Icelander explains the local climate to a visitor: "In Iceland we don't have weather, we have examples of weather." Similarly, in the Glucksman, we have examples of Gerhard Richter. But then, you could say that Richter's entire career has proceeded on the basis of examples.
It's as if he set out to thwart any expectation of stylistic consistency, the standard model of the artist devising and progressively refining a personal style. Richter seems to recoil from the ideas of both style and personal. There is an offhand, chilly edge to most of his work, as though he is at one or more removes from what he is doing, separated by a barrier of scepticism. Yet he has made palpably personal paintings, and without irony, most conspicuously around the time of his marriage in 1995 to Sabine Moritz and the subsequent birth of their children Moritz and Ella Maria. More than that, he has always responded sharply to frequent accusations that he doesn't mean what he does, that it is all an intellectual game.
TO THE OBVIOUS suggestion that he might be a conceptual artist who works with painting - a flattering idea in an era when painting was seen as unfashionable - he returned a blanket No. His work is painting through and through. Yet many of those on the side of painting would have been happy to see him co-opted by conceptualism, because there was and is a view that he is a destructive painter, someone who is out to demonstrate the limitations of the medium and finish it off. Again, he argues that he simply tries to paint.
The title of his collected writings from 1962 to 1993 pushed home this point. The book was called simply The Daily Practice of Painting. Again and again he has come out with statements along the lines of: "Theory has nothing to do with a work of art." Or, in relation to what he tries to do in his work: "How I can paint today, and above all what. Or, to put it another way: The continual attempt to picture to myself what is going on."
Ultimately, he is a prime example of an artist who doesn't set out to make it easy for the viewer, but in a good way. Despite his evident capacity to irritate a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, his large 2002 retrospective Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting demonstrated convincingly that he is one of the key artists of the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, that, much more than is the case with many better-known or trendier figures, he could be described as the Manet of our time, a true painter of modern life, and his attempts to deal with the complexities of the contemporary in painting are, taken overall, hugely impressive.
In bringing together so many strands of his diverse output, the retrospective also made it clear just how influential he has been.
Artists had based their whole careers on approaches to making art that had occupied him for relatively short periods. At the simplest level, he has perplexed viewers for his habit of moving freely between abstraction and representation. One could add moving between painting and photography, because he earned some notoriety for his appropriation of photography. Of course artists had used photography since its invention and, equally, pictorialist strategies had been adopted by photographers.
What Richter did, though, was to take the vernacular of the photographic snapshot and take it as a language in itself, a subject, which he then reworked in painting. Rather than using photography as a reference in making paintings, his paintings were paintings of photographs, often at second hand via reproduced imagery, something that has become commonplace in contemporary art since. A work like his Uncle Rudi (1965), a more recent version of which is included in the Glucksman show, gives some idea of the implications. The image is a blurred family snapshot. No effort is made to disguise the optical inadequacies of the source.
As Robert Storr noted in writing about Richter's work though, the painting does much more. Such photographs make up casual, unofficial archives, hidden away in boxes and albums. This one is not just any snapshot, but one that foregrounds a common, problematic aspect of family histories in post-war Germany: "The Nazi in the family." Other, related works expand on the theme. Rudi was killed in action in 1944. But Richter's Aunt Marianne, the subject of another painting of the time, was also killed, in different circumstances, as an asylum inmate during a programme of euthanasia. Paradoxically, by seeming to limit the role of painting, Richter had evaded its conventional strictures and enlarged its possibilities.
He began using photographs in this way around 1962. Born in what was East Germany, he grew up and was trained in the conservative context of socialist realist art. When he moved to the West, to Düsseldorf, in 1961, he and others, including Sigmar Polke, embarked on a mode of painting related to Pop Art and styled Capitalist Realism. But he was never going to settle into a particular style or movement, and from that time onwards he has engaged in a rigorous, even ruthless exploration of what was possible in painting, today.
Much of what is possible veers close to nothing. In series of abstract paintings he systematically discards the characteristic trappings, introducing arbitrary, impersonal processes, working in series to undermine the centrality of any one image. Yet what is surprising, as in a series of paintings made last year currently showing as part of the Venice Biennale, is how nothing can generate something. Those paintings, big, grey, almost featureless abstracts, distinguished by Richter's trademark sideways slide of the squeegee, a gesture of obliteration more than making, have a monumental, fascinating presence.
HIS MOST CONTROVERSIAl work is undoubtedly a series of 15 murky grey paintings made around 1988 and titled 18 October 1977, the day when the bodies of members of the Red Army Faction were discovered, after apparently fulfilling a suicide pact, in Stammheim Prison. It would be rash to interpret Richter's paintings as a protest, however.
Firstly he mulled over the material, the event and the documents, for almost a decade. Then, characteristically, he resisted any invitation to take ideological sides in the argument. Rather, he argued, he was interested in the overwhelming lure of ideological conviction in itself, a notion that surely bounces us right back to the question of Uncle Rudi. Personally, he said: "I want to produce a picture and not an ideology." He felt: "A profound distaste for all claims to possess the truth."
In his approach to painting he has always worked from an essentially Beckettian position. That is, Beckett's description of the artist's predicament in turning away from the merely predictable. By doing so, Beckett implies - and it could be a description of his own evolving mode of writing - one is led to a more interesting but fairly desperate standpoint, aiming for: "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express." In strikingly similar terms, Richter himself had described the process of painting as the last desperate act when every possibility has been exhausted. As with Beckett, it's an approach that has proved to be unexpectedly fruitful.
Gerhard Richter: Survey is at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, UCC: Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Thurs 10am-8pm, Sun noon-5pm. Until Oct 7 021-4901844