Gerhard Richter: Landschaften

Over the following decades, Richter continued to paint landscapes from photographic sources, manipulating his brushwork into an energetic tangle or a sfumato haze to test the malleable boundary between representation and abstraction. After Richter formalized his Abstract Paintings in 1976, the two series developed in tandem, each informing the underlying pictorial concerns of the other. In some cases, abstractions began as landscapes, only to be overpainted with gestural marks; in others, abstract works conjure landscapes through evocative titles alone.

Displayed in dialogue through a chronological progression of rooms, these two aspects of Richter’s oeuvre together illustrate his investigation into the nature of images and the perception of reality—how it is personally interpreted, mediated by the external world, and visually portrayed through painting.

Ohne Titel (grün) (Untitled [green]) is part of a small but crucial body of paintings from 1971 that initially stemmed from a photograph Richter took of a park near Düsseldorf, where he was living at the time. A dense matrix of energetic, gestural brushstrokes renders the verdant scene from the original snapshot onto canvas. In 1972, Ohne Titel (grün) (Untitled [green]) was featured in Richter’s solo presentation at the German Pavilion of the 36th Venice Biennale.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Richter created several series depicting expansive natural views: icebergs, volcanoes, Alpine mountains, and open waters. Richter’s works present a view of the world that is detached from person and place and often blurred to the point of unrecognition. These paintings subtly complicate how a landscape—in the artistic and sociopolitical sense—can be visually and culturally understood.

Richter’s landscape paintings contrast importantly with his expansive Abstract Paintings. Begun in 1976, the abstractions were originally conceived using a collage technique in which the artist pieced together painterly layers and shadows from photographic sources, including images of his own paintings. By the mid-1980s, these works had become completely divorced from any representational origin, instead foregrounding the sheer gestural and material presence of paint. 
 
The artist would return to landscapes across the 1980s and 1990s, each time depicting anonymized locations with his signature sfumato surface treatment. He also evoked landscape by titling some of his Abstract Paintings after real-world objects, as seen in Fenster (Window, 1985) and Wolken (Clouds, 1982; collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Venedig (Venice, 1986; Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden) is part of an important 1985–1986 series of landscapes that illustrate scenes from the titular Italian city. The painting began as one of the artist’s Fotobilder (Photo Paintings), in this case using his characteristic blurred paint application to depict a Venetian canal with trees visible in the background. Richter then brushed over parts of the finished canvas in various shades of gray, yellow, red, and black.

Kapelle (Chapel, 1995) also began as a Photo Painting, in this case depicting the interior of a church. In 1995, Richter brushed over much of the finished canvas with a spatula—the same technique used in his Abstract Paintings—covering its surface in multiple layers of blue and white paint until the image was barely visible beneath. Richter often partially painted over his photo paintings in such a way, evincing his longstanding interest in using visual obfuscation to collapse the boundary between abstraction and representation.

Apfelbäume (Apple Trees; collection of the artist) is one of a group of three works from 1987, all with the same title, which depict the same bucolic scene of trees in a field next to a winding road. With each successive painting, Richter blurs the landscape more and more, capturing various points along the spectrum between representation and abstraction.