Gerard Richter (after) - STRIP (921-2) / Lo tienes que ver…

Gerard Richter Cartel offset (*)
Edited for the exhibition “You Have to See It…” at the Juan March Foundation in 2025.
Reproduction of the work STRIP (921-2), created by Richter in 2011 and part of the Fondation Louis Vuitton collection in Paris.
Published by Fundación Juan March.
Authorized printing with copyright.
Large Format.

*** LAST COPIES ***

- Sheet dimensions: 96.7 x 61.5 cm
- Year: 2025
- Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited, always kept in a professional art folder, and is therefore in perfect condition).
- Provenance: Private collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. The shipment will be registered with a tracking number.

The shipment will also include transport insurance for the final value of the work with full reimbursement in case of loss or damage, at no cost to the buyer.

(*) Gerhard Richter, still active in his nineties, dared to oppose Adorno by affirming that, even after Auschwitz, there exists poetry.
This author, born in 1932 in Dresden, trained at his Academy of Fine Arts and resident in West Germany since 1961, has essentially made the question of how far it was possible to make art after Nazism and the Holocaust the focus of his production. He preferred destroying some of his early canvases, sometimes titled Execution or Hitler (1962); works that would be followed, in the mid to late sixties and with better material fortune, by Aunt Marianne, Uncle Rudy, or Mr. Heyde, based on previous photographs and alluding to both the German past and his own family history.

In parallel, he began to gather historical visual testimonies, sometimes private, such as photos, newspaper clippings and sketches, into what he called his Atlas, from which he has not ceased to draw sources to this day; from that archive are, again, images of concentration camps that in the nineties he tried to use as pictorial motifs for the first time, but he discarded the idea.

Richter understands art as a catalyst for problems and as a problem in itself: he has been interested in the other side of painting, the ability to affirm the meaning of the act of painting only to deny it and emphasize the distances between painting that represents motifs and that other painting that reflects on itself and not on reality.

When he decided to leave East Germany, he did so after discovering Fontana’s and Pollock’s works at the 1958 Kassel Documenta: both represented a spur to conclude that his search would be based on the struggle against painting without abandoning it. Under the influence of other European authors (Giacometti and Dubuffet) he began to reproduce photographs in oil and, eager to distance himself from German tradition, began a artistic path that he wanted independent, halfway between philosophical skepticism and gravity.

Those photographs that fed Richter were, at the same time, very bitter: he believed they vegetated and led a nomadic and miserable life; also that he could redo them, rescue them. For the German, the painter should not seek to express the character of his model, and when working from a photo, he will not represent an individual, but an image that will have nothing to do with him. The purpose of resemblance would be useless.

Expanding on that idea, painting from a photo would erase conscious thought: the artist does not need to make decisions. There is no notion of originality, the temptation to describe, sentimentality, thematic or iconographic content… For all this, the public will also have to change their ways of seeing and thinking: if the canvas no longer imitates, and cannot be interpreted as a document, one will have to look for an unrealism in which irony fits.

What do his techniques consist of? Richter copies in oil on primed canvas, with precision and without the intention to add or remove, anonymous photos with no aesthetic pretensions nor, apparently, emotional value. He neither alters nor distorts the starting images, and his reason precedes his art: I do not need to deform as Bacon does; the objects are already quite terrifying.

The dominant grays in many of his pieces connect to that zero desire to express opinion; again, quoting his words, gray is more qualified than any other color to represent nothing at all. He breaks, however, with that mechanization, the discovery that would be his hallmark: the blurring of contours that contrasts with the sharpness of classical photography and that causes us to be, at once, before the real image and its dissolution.

I do not need to deform as Bacon does; the objects are already quite terrifying.

Regarding the selection of the images that feed his production, Richter does not choose them randomly. One of the most emblematic is the aforementioned Uncle Rudy (1965), his own uncle: apparently a cheerful man who wears the Nazi army uniform. The artist dedicated this work to the victims of the SS during the punitive action against the Czechoslovak population of Lidice, in 1984; we can understand it, therefore, as a reflection on acts of commemoration and mourning in his country, in the postwar period. Pain and death also obsessed him, as he again demonstrated in Sniped 2 (1988), a manifestation of his despair before the dilemma that our eye allows us to identify things and, at the same time, prevents and restricts the understanding of reality.

In 2014, and for the Birkenau series, his starting point were four photos of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp themselves, secretly taken in 1944 by Jewish prisoners who risked their lives to take them. They show both the terrain of the camp and the interior of crematorium V, with numerous corpses, and they are the only preserved images of these extermination spaces that come from the victims.

They were not published until after World War II and, in 1967, Richter had already included several of them in his Atlas, but it would not be until the appearance of some in Georges Didi-Huberman’s Imágenes a pesar de todo (2008), in which the philosopher used them to analyze how the Holocaust could be represented, when he felt the impulse to use them in his work. He transferred four scenes, with charcoal and oil paint, to individual canvases and then painted over them from abstract parameters, so that with each added layer the original motifs disappeared until they ended up not being visible.

We have referred to concrete pieces, but to understand Richter’s work we must study it as a whole: his diverse styles have been simultaneous, and therefore ambiguous. In one and the other he has sought technical mastery, and globally they seem to articulate a grand opera: he has cultivated monochrome and expressionism, hyperrealism and abstraction. Landscape, portrait and still life.

His color samples are well known, which tended to challenge a certain decorative aspect in European abstraction; they are industrial catalogs that affect what painting has as a brilliant show and detract from the foundations of styles. The fruit resembles a fresco of that discipline in the 20th century.

Like Josef Albers, he too investigated color fields starting from the geometric form of the square from the mid-sixties, when he was fascinated, almost obsessed, by the color swatches produced industrially, with their smooth perfection and precision in reproducing tones and their variation possibilities. For Richter, those squares evoked the opposite of emotional emphasis, expressiveness, or the sublime, that is, the properties that, until the early decades of the last century, had been regarded as inherent to painting.