Personal 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. (2025)