Gerhard Richter: New Works

The renowned German painter arrives in Shinjuku

Abstract Painting [890-5], oil on canvas, 82x59cm, 2004 photos Courtesy of Wako Works of Art

This has been an excellent year for German arts in Japan. Exhibitions and events as part of, or simply complementing, the Deutschland in Japan 2005/2006 project have brought several broad-ranging group shows and performances along with top artists like Stephan Balkenhol and Sigmar Polke.

The latest artist to arrive on Tokyo’s stage is Gerhard Richter, arguably the most recognizable artist in the contemporary German scene and one of the most preeminent art celebrities in the world. Renowned for his stylistic divergences into romantic landscape, ironic photorealism and colorful abstraction, Richter has continually reinvented himself and endured as a label-resistant painter who epitomizes the open-ended possibilities of postmodern thought in the contemporary art world.

Though he has been featured in three major exhibitions this year (one each at Kanazawa’s 21st Century Museum and the Kawamura Art Museum in Chiba), this exhibition at Shinjuku’s Wako Works of Art is the first to focus exclusively on pieces created in the past two years. Although Richter’s work is at its most compelling when it is larger-than-life and consumes the viewer through sheer enormity, the smaller images in this exhibition reveal their intricacies by pulling spectators in rather than pushing them away. And while there are numerous engaging artworks on display, the exhibition ultimately serves as little more than a thin primer to Richter’s expansive vocabulary of abstraction.

Entering the gallery, viewers are confronted with a characteristically mixed assortment from Richter’s broad portfolio. Of immediate interest is a series of prints entitled 5 Studies in Graphite, 13. Jan. 2005. These eerily pastoral abstractions—brazenly signed and dated across their middle—have thick gray and blue landscape-like smears of paint pressed in rambling lines over a background field of patterned graphite spheres. Secure in their quiet but forceful voice, these pieces emanate the sophisticated painterly coolness for which Richter is so revered.

The majority of the other artworks are defined by a reserved emotionality and resonating sensations of nature. Straightforward and familiar as abstractions, they are covered with stark backgrounds of cadmium reds and earthy umbers. Richter alternately scratches and strokes their surfaces with a number of lines that form erratic but visceral collisions of shape and color. The heavily worked ground of Abstract Painting [889-2] (2004) typifies the exploratory qualities of Richter’s investment in his images through its combed surface and lightning-like trails of brushstrokes and scrapes that cascade down with wabisabi-like indifference to calculation.

5 studies for Graphite, 13. Jan.2005 (2), oil on offset print, 30x35.8cm, 2005

A final series, dated works ranging from Feb. 05 to March 03, offers a different take on Richter’s well-established use of photographic images. Two rows of postcard-sized snapshots are variously covered in impasto waves of oily color that render the underlying images only partly decipherable. Globular pink lines form alternate horizons over a snowy mountain scene in one image, while in another a blurry child is consumed by an anamorphic field of orangey yellows.

These subtle but affecting works present a connection between Richter’s paintings of found photographs and his purely abstract works. They are as innovative as they are predictable from a painter who continues to flaunt his unabating joy in using numerous painterly strategies, while also demonstrating his total possession of the craft.

Wako Works of Art, Until Dec 24. See exhibition listings (Shinjuku) for details.

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