Gerhard Richter, Orchidee II (Orchid II), 1998. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Gerhard Richter has spent much of his monumental career probing the boundary between photography and painting, captivated by how these distinct forms of image-making challenge and inform the broader contexts of art and history, as well as each other. His editions exemplify this exploration, synthesizing photography and painting through the medium of print. Most often utilizing lithography and cibachrome printing, Richter’s editions result from a meticulous multi-step, multi-media process.
This seamless interplay between print, paint, and photography highlights the complexity of their relationship, with Richter valuing each medium equally. Through this process, Richter explores art historical paradigms, confronts history, and revels in abstraction. Ahead of our Evening & Day Editions auction in London on 6–7 June, we examine how Richter’s varied editions achieved these feats, drawing on works available in the upcoming sale.
Sometimes I think I shouldn’t call myself a painter but rather a maker of images. I am more interested in images than in painting.
—Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter, Hood, 1996. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Richter’s artistic practice is deeply interwoven with his personal history and the seismic cultural shifts he witnessed through the 20th century. In particular, the profound impacts of National Socialism and World War II, which shadowed Richter’s formative years, reverberate throughout his oeuvre. His formal artistic studies began in the late 1950s at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, when he was taught the Socialist Realist style mandated by the East German government. However, in a pivotal moment, Richter defected to West Germany in 1961, just two months before the Berlin Wall's construction. He then studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1961–64 under Karl Otto Götz, alongside contemporaries including Sigmar Polke. Here, Richter liberated his artistic expression from ideological constraints, co-founding the Capitalistic Realism movement, which critiqued both socialist and capitalist art doctrines. This new approach laid the foundations for his later work, which engages in a profound artistic dialogue with history and an enduring interrogation of image-making.
Gerhard Richter, Domecke I (Cathedral Corner I), 1998. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Softness in still lifes
Richter poignantly employed the traditional genre of still life to explore media and to probe art historical paradigms. His still lifes depict familiar everyday objects — a loo roll, an orchid, a candle — isolated and rendered in an almost haunting haze. Orchidee II of 1998, for instance, is one of five cibachrome prints created by the artist that meditate on the delicate form of this tropical flower, each shifting between various viewpoints and at various degrees of sharpness. These compositions were based on a photograph of Richter’s 1997 oil painting Orchidee, which in turn was based on an earlier photograph of an orchid taken by the artist. As the orchid motif has journeyed across media through Richter’s process, blooming in and out of focus, it diverts increasingly further from the original source at each step. Richter did not conceal evidence of these various stages, but rather incorporated them, utilizing the blur of his camera as well as the sfumato of his brush. The final cibachrome prints capture this multi-step process completed over years, compressing time and media to create something entirely new. Through serial reproduction, Richter transformed these ordinary objects into bewilderingly powerful and uncanny works of art.
Gerhard Richter, Loo Paper, 1994. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Crucially, Richter did not simply replicate his paintings in photographic form; he made intentional deviations. In re-photographing his former works the artist reflects on their distinct formal aspects, making subtle modifications detected only by the scrupulous eye. As Richter stated: “In the photographs, I take even more focus out of the painted image ... I also subtract the materiality, the surface of the painting, and it becomes something different.” The varying depths of field and coloration paired with the compositional cropping throughout the process showcase the deliberate experimentation of a thoroughly reconfigured picture. The use of soft focus evokes the impression of a demonstrative naivety in photography, whereas the blurring of the out-of-focus object in paint typifies the technical prowess of the painter. This dichotomy between photography and paint establishes a creative tension between the two mediums — opposing yet integral to the final printed editions.
Of course, pictures of objects also have this transcendental side to them. Every object, being part of an ultimately incomprehensible world, also embodies that world; when represented in a picture, the object conveys this mystery all the more powerfully.
—Gerhard Richter
Richter also uses the genre of still life to question the objects and images that comprise our everyday experience. In Loo Paper of 1994, he presents an object so very quotidian that it almost feels unfamiliar when presented in an artistic context. Loo Paper is a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s renowned 1917 readymade Fountain, which greatly inspired Richter after he saw a northern European retrospective of Dada and Surrealism in 1965. By their very definition, readymades are mass-produced and non-unique, and therefore subvert traditional notions of originality in the artistic process. It was this idea that made a strong impression on Richter, triggering him to shift his artistic approach. He recognized the potential of the readymade to free painting from its mimetic function, which inspired new ideas for the artist, including the possibility of pictorial objectification and the rejection of traditional notions of originality and authorship. Through photographing his own paintings and then utilizing these photographs as source material — as in Loo Paper — Richter evokes Dadaist tenets by blurring the boundaries between original and copy, past and present.
Face-to-face with the past
Across his oeuvre, Richter has repeatedly engaged with 20th century history, particularly with the catastrophic events that took place during the Nazi regime. No work embodies Richter’s direct yet thoughtful approach to confronting this past more so than Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi), created in 2000. It presents the artist’s maternal uncle, Rudolf Schönfelder, and is based on a 1965 painting Richter made of a family photograph he brought with him when he fled the GDR to West Germany. At once direct and tender, the image captures Rudolf standing rigidly before army barracks, with a bashful grin directed at the camera. He is dressed in the Wehrmacht uniform worn by Nazi soldiers during World War II. This poignantly points to Uncle Rudi’s death, as he would die fighting at the front in 1944.
As the title suggests, there is a deeply personal relationship between the subject and the artist; Richter turned away from public historical records to instead probe his own personal history, reaching into his family archive for source material. Here, as Uncle Rudi stands smartly dressed with a beaming smile, his hazy image shifts in and out of focus in blurred tones of grey, materializing like the vision of a distant memory. Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi) embodies the way in which Richter confronts his own family’s involvement in the atrocities of the Nazi regime and speaks to the broader German cultural reckoning in the post war era. As Richter’s uncle hovers in a blur between past and present, personal and universal, Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi) utilizes paint, photography, and print to create an image through which Richter examines Germany’s recent history on both a societal and individual level.
Gerhard Richter, Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi), 2000. Evening & Day Editions, London.
There are many “Uncle Rudis” in Germany and the universality of it is what interested me. He symbolically represents the soldiers of the Third Reich.
—Gerhard Richter
As with Richter’s still lifes, when looking at Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi) we are not sure if we see a photographed painting or a painterly photograph. Nonetheless, the work’s aesthetic connections with photography condense the sense of time passed into a single image. In its essence, a photograph immortalizes a singular moment in time, seeking to freeze it for eternity. This act of preservation is almost defiant against the inevitability of time’s passing and so, in turn, it offers a tangible reminder of life's transient nature. Each click of the shutter is a testament to existence, a fleeting instant captured and preserved, perhaps in an attempt to momentarily halt the ceaseless march of time. For Richter, his use of photography deftly navigates the intersections of painting and mechanical reproduction, blurring the boundaries between the two. His method becomes a reflection on how images, like memories, evolve over time, acquiring new layers of meaning with each iteration.
Beyond abstraction
Gerhard Richter, Ophelia, 1998. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Richter’s reflective investigation into image-making includes many forays into abstraction. Although visually distinct from his still lifes and historical works, Richter’s abstract pieces maintain his central preoccupations with image-making and the blurring of media to question conventions of art history. This is exemplified in works like Ophelia and Guildenstern, which present an extremely close-up detail of lacquer, oil paint, and water from a 1977 painting by the artist. In contrast to the gestural swathes of paint that characterize Abstract Expressionist works of the mid-twentieth century, in Richter’s works all signs of the artist’s hand are removed. The colors of Ophelia and Guildenstern appear to move, mix, and react autonomously, like a chemical reaction, removing any notion of the master artist’s individual creative prowess. Ironically, these works simultaneously depict the very essence of traditional artistic genius: paint pigment.
Toying with our understanding of originality and artistic creation, Richter also questions what abstraction fundamentally is. On the one hand, Ophelia and Guildenstern are entirely abstract — there is no pictorial motif that they refer to in a figurative sense. Yet, the works are made from photographs taken by the artist — mechanically reproduced images of life. In this way, Richter’s “abstract” works confront us with contradictions in our understanding of painting and photography as media for image-making, as well as questioning the dichotomies of abstraction and figuration, original and reproduction, man-made and machine-made. In this sense, works such as Opheliaand Guildenstern are not necessarily abstract creations, but rather are reflexive meditations on the paradigm of abstract painting.
Gerhard Richter, Guildenstern, 1998. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Gerhard Richter’s editions serve as a testament to his relentless exploration and redefinition of artistic boundaries. They transcend traditional media classifications, creating a unique dialogue that challenges our understanding of art and history. His intricate processes and thoughtful engagement with personal and collective memory invite us to reconsider the nature of images and their lasting impact. As we delve into Richter's multifaceted creations, we are reminded of the power of art to not only reflect but also shape our perception of the world, making Richter's editions an enduring and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary art.