Gerhard Richter | London | January 25—March 28, 2024 | David Zwirner

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter, 11.8.2023 (3), 2023 (detail)

Gerhard Richter, 11.8.2023 (3), 2023 (detail)

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent work by renowned German artist Gerhard Richter at the gallery’s 24 Grafton Street location in London. This marks the gallery’s first presentation of Richter’s work in London since announcing his representation in December 2022, and follows the artist’s recent debut at David Zwirner in New York in spring of 2023.

This considered installation expands upon Richter’s sustained inquiry into the fixity of perception and reaffirms his unwavering commitment to the formal and conceptual possibilities of abstraction. Centrally featured are three of the artist’s celebrated abstract paintings, made in the years preceding his decision to move away from oil paint and turn toward drawing and installation with increasing dedication. An expansive group of new works on paper—some made with ink or pencil, others with a combination of the two—illuminates the newfound urgency and prominence that Richter has placed on method and technique in drawing.

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

Gerhard Richter

Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2016

Oil on canvas

39 3/8 x 26 3/8 inches (100 x 67 cm)

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2016 (detail)

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2016 (detail)

Gerhard Richter

Abstraktes Bild, Juist (Abstract Painting, Juist), 2011

Oil on canvas

32 1/4 x 24 3/8 inches (82 x 62 cm)

“The practice of drawing, more than painting, would appear to be linked to the diary … a parallel time, in the interval, a fortuitous time caught in the weft of the calendar.”

—Birgit Pelzer, curator and critic, 1999

Gerhard Richter

26 Zeichnungen (26 Drawings), 2023

Pencil and ink on paper in twenty-six (26) parts

Each: 5 7/8 x 8 1/8 inches (14.9 x 20.6 cm)
Framed, each: 9 x 11 1/2 inches (22.9 x 29.2 cm)

Gerhard Richter

11.8.2023, 2023

Colored ink, ink, and pencil on paper

8 1/2 x 10 1/4 inches (21.5 x 26 cm)
Framed: 13 1/4 x 14 5/8 inches (33.5 x 37.2 cm)

“Drawing is a little like writing.… While reading we decipher it, we complete it.”

—Gerhard Richter, 1997

Gerhard Richter

24.7.2023, 2023

Colored ink and pencil on paper

8 1/2 x 10 1/4 inches (21.5 x 26 cm)
Framed: 13 1/4 x 14 5/8 inches (33.5 x 37.2 cm)

Gerhard Richter

6.8.2023, 2023

Colored ink and pencil on paper

8 1/2 x 10 1/4 inches (21.5 x 26 cm)
Framed: 13 1/4 x 14 5/8 inches (33.5 x 37.2 cm)

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

“Richter employed black ink, which he let drip onto the paper, in the drawings from 2022; he added solvent and carefully shifted the sheets until the forms emerging from the movement pleased him, sometimes supplementing them with drawn lines.”

—Dieter Schwarz, art historian, curator, and writer, 2023

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

“What characterizes drawing even more obviously than painting is the sense of disarray, the absence of a way out.… Drawing is … an erasure, an almost nothing, right at the extreme edge where everything would fall into pieces. Just before then you stop.”

—Gerhard Richter, 1997

Gerhard Richter

11.5.2023, 2023

Pencil on paper

8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches (21 x 29.7 cm)
Framed: 13 5/8 x 17 1/2 inches (34.5 x 44.5 cm)

Gerhard Richter

20.5.2023, 2023

Pencil on paper

8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches (21 x 29.7 cm)
Framed: 13 5/8 x 17 1/2 inches (34.5 x 44.5 cm)

In Richter’s pencil drawings, graphic, hard-edge shapes are juxtaposed with meandering lines and passages of smudging, hatching, and removal. The blurring and obscuring of graphite are grounded by Richter’s signature and a date, affixing these optically slippery images to an exact day and year. These works are often grouped in series, dated one after another, representing a kind of cycle or sequence. As Dieter Schwarz notes, “Painting had never been a continuous process for him: weeks of intense painting were followed by extended pauses, a time of inspection, of inner questioning.… This also proved true for his works on paper.”

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

This exhibition also features a group of vibrant lacquer-behind-glass paintings from 2010. These intimately scaled works, named after characters and figures from the anthology of Middle Eastern folk tales One Thousand and One Nights, were produced by pouring, tilting, and mixing enamel paints onto Plexiglas, pressing a pane of glass atop the pigments and lifting it up to make an exact impression of the patterns underneath.

Gerhard Richter

Aladin (Aladdin), 2010

Lacquer behind glass, mounted on Alu-Dibond

19 3/4 x 14 5/8 inches (50 x 37 cm)

Gerhard Richter

Abdallah (Abdallah), 2010

Lacquer behind glass

6 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches (16 x 16 cm)
Framed: 12 5/8 x 12 5/8 inches (32 x 32 cm)

In these works, Richter explores the dual role of paint as conceptual image and physical substance, as well as the idea of the picture plane itself. They also extend his fascination with glass—an avenue of inquiry that has been present in his work since the 1960s.

Gerhard Richter

Aladin (Aladdin), 2010

Lacquer behind glass, mounted on Alu-Dibond

14 5/8 x 19 3/4 inches (37 x 50 cm)

Gerhard Richter

Ifrit, 2010

Lacquer behind glass, mounted on Alu-Dibond

12 3/8 x 15 3/4 inches (31.3 x 40 cm)

The lacquer works led to Richter’s development of the Strip paintings, begun in 2011. “Richter’s Strips collectively represent a dialogue between painting, photography, print reproduction, and abstraction,” the art historian Benjamin Buchloh writes. “[They] reveal the past promises of facture and color as purely delusional in the present…. At the same time painting longs to retrieve those promises of perception that had been embedded in past artistic forms, now irretrievably lost.”

Gerhard Richter

Strip, 2013/2016

Digital print on paper between Alu Dibond and Perspex (Diasec)

Four (4) panels, each: 78 3/4 x 98 3/8 inches (200 x 250 cm)
Overall: 78 3/4 x 393 3/4 inches (200 x 1000 cm)

The Strip painting featured in this exhibition is one of the largest to date. Richter began the series by photographing his painting Abstraktes Bild 724–4 (Abstract Painting 724–4) (1990). The photograph was then subjected to a digital process which split the image vertically into mirrored halves, repeating the same action until the original painting’s textured surface became an array of flat lines, each one representing a 0.08-millimeter slice of the original photograph. These lines were then stretched horizontally to create the final composition.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1990, the work on which the Strip paintings are based.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1990, the work on which the Strip paintings are based.

“As we enter a new stage of technological development and destruction with artificial intelligence, Richter’s work may not provide us with a center, but it can perhaps point to a way to keep going, accepting there and rejecting here, and above all continuing, finding new possibilities.”

—John Ganz, artist and writer, 2023

Gerhard Richter, Strip, 2013/2016 (detail)

Gerhard Richter, Strip, 2013/2016 (detail)

Two works in this exhibition are part of the artist’s extensive Spiegel (Mirror) series, begun in 1977. Richter’s practice evinces a long-standing interest in the idea of reflection and a fascination with glass, which he has positioned as a literal reflection on painting and image-making rather than as a form of pure sculpture. His large-scale paintings and room-sized installations using glass and mirrored surfaces serve as sites for the perpetual creation and contemplation of a new kind of abstract image.

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

“The felt analogy between a composed painting and a contemplative viewer is so fundamental that we are not aware of it until it is interfered with. And this is precisely what the glass pieces do: our reflection, in the sense of our mirrored image, disrupts our reflection, in the sense of our contemplation.”

—Hal Foster, art critic and historian, 2020

Gerhard Richter

15.3.2023 (2), 2023

Collage on paper

16 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches (42 x 29.7 cm)
Framed: 21 1/4 x 16 1/8 inches (54 x 41 cm)

Gerhard Richter

15.3.2023, 2023

Collage on paper

16 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches (42 x 29.7 cm)
Framed: 21 1/4 x 16 1/8 inches (54 x 41 cm)

Featuring arrays of interlocking and overlapping polygons in various colors, Richter’s collages formally and conceptually recall his previous Farbtafel (Color Chart) paintings, begun in the 1960s and revisited in the 2000s, which took the form of multiple colored squares arranged in a randomly organized grid. Initially inspired by the standardized rectangular format of commercial paint samples, the Color Charts combine the Duchampian idea of the readymade with Richter’s longstanding interest in the work of composer and theorist John Cage and the role of chance in image-making.

Gerhard Richter, 15.3.2023, 2023 (detail)

Gerhard Richter, 15.3.2023, 2023 (detail)

Created on the occasion of Gerhard Richter: Die Editionen at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, Schädel (Skull) (2017) again attests to the diversity of Richter’s work, which spans objects, installation, drawing, editions, and photographic documentation. Prints and multiples have played a crucial role in his oeuvre since 1965, when he created Hund (Dog), his first editioned work.

Gerhard Richter

Schädel (Skull), 2017

Diasec photograph mounted between antelio glass and plexiglass

21 5/8 x 19 3/4 inches (55 x 50 cm)
Edition of 28, 7 AP

Gerhard Richter, Schädel (Skull), 1983

Gerhard Richter, Schädel (Skull), 1983

Like many of Richter’s editions, Schädel (Skull) is printed from a photograph of a painting of the same name, done in 1983—a notable example of Richter’s so-called “photo-paintings” that is itself based on a photograph he took. The Schädel paintings, of which four are held in museum collections, meditate on the passing of time. The relationship between this edition and its original show Richter’s transformative approach to image-making, collapsing the distinctions between mediums and reflecting on our perception of the world around us.

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, London, 2024

“Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense.”

—Gerhard Richter, 1962

Gerhard Richter, February 1962. Photo by Gerhard Richter. © Gerhard Richter 2020. Courtesy the artist and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

Gerhard Richter, February 1962. Photo by Gerhard Richter. © Gerhard Richter 2020. Courtesy the artist and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

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