Green-Blue

Gerhard Richter

Dresden, Germany, 1932
  • Date: 
    1993
  • Technique: 
    Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 
    Polyptych: 240 x 1110 cm / Each part: 240 x 240 cm
  • Category: 
    Painting
  • Entry date: 
    1997
  • Register number: 
    AD00250

Gerhard Richter received his training during the cultural reconstruction taking place in Germany after the war and his career has spanned over fifty years. Starting in the 1960s, Richter questions the relationship between painting and photography, as part of his inquiry into the representation of images and the experience of reality. From 1962 onwards he maintains, as a visual memory reference, an archive – containing mostly photographs – called Atlas, from which he draws themes and motifs that he then reproduces with oil paint, as the basis of his ongoing exploration of the possibilities of painting. Richter also depicts recent German history, proposing a renovation of history painting as a critical reflection of this genre, in the context of the problematical redefinition of the country’s identity. This four-panel polyptych belongs to his series of abstract works, a series that contains none of the figurative and narrative references of his previous stage, thereby defending the coexistence of different methods in the arena of a kind of painting untouched by dogma. In Green-Blue the painting seems to draw up within itself in a Baroque gesture of microscopic investigation of its basic elements.

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