Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Gerhard Richter
German; 20th-century, 21st-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
69%
January, December, and November. 1989. Oil on canvas
Technically these six paired canvases are three separate diptychs, but they're presented at SLAM with one label (it speaks to the world-historical significance of 1989) and hung like a giant triptych, so I think I'm justified in treating them as a single work. The paintings are about technique much more than they are about structure, which you kind of have to go searching for and even when you do it's tough to find. That's not necessarily a shortcoming, especially since there's so much that Richter's technique offers to the eye — chiefly, the parallax thing that happens wherever color pokes through the black and white, since the reds and blues and yellows appear to jump out in front of the black/white but are in actuality the paintings' ground. This, along with the constant interruptions to any singular type of handling that tries to take hold, gives all six canvases the effect of a depth that doesn't move back away from the picture plane but rather proceeds out from it. However, that's ultimately meager fare: none of Richter's "effects" end up resulting in a unifying formal language, such that everything ends up feeling a bit like a fireworks show rather than a painting. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Sotheby's New York (Exhibition: Icons: Back to Madison)
50%
Zwei Kerzen (Two Candles). 1982. Oil on canvas
It's tough to admit that there are paintings — potentially good paintings, even — that can be victims of the popular success they've had as images. Would these Richter candle paintings be better if one of their ilk hadn't been made into, like, the most famous album cover ever? Probably. But it's impossible to see any of them as anything other than all the associations that attend on Sonic fucking Youth. There are paintings like, I don't know, the Mona Lisa that manage, when you're looking at the real thing, to slough off all their cultural sediment and become more than the sum of what our image economy has prepared you to think about them. I guess that's because paintings like the Mona Lisa are really good. (Which is maybe to say that this painting is maybe not that good.) (TFS, 2025)