With the exhibition Gerhard Richter | Overpainted Photographs, Sies + Höke presents 65 works dating from the years 1989 to 2018, illuminating this important part of Richter’s oeuvre.
Overpainted photographs were created by Richter from the late 1980s onwards. Despite their small format, they have a significant status within the artist’s œuvre: like no other group of works, they embody the interface between the representation of photographic image content and abstract painting. This is not merely a technique – such as watercolor on paper – “but rather a special methodical procedure for obtaining unfamiliar images on the basis of the familiar.” (Uwe M. Schneede) Through photography, a representational motif is conveyed pictorially, while at the same time an abstract color matter is applied to the surface. These two levels of reality appear as an interlocking unity, they enter into a close, tension-filled and subtle connection.
“I took some small photographs,” Gerhard Richter said in an interview in 1991, “and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem”. By “the problem” Richter refers to the relationship between the reality of the photograph and that of the paint. “Photography has almost no reality, it is almost a hundred per cent picture”, Richter remarks, “and painting always has reality, you can touch the paint; it has presence”.
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The exhibition Gerhard Richter | Overpainted Photographs is accompanied by an extensive catalogue with a reprinted essay by Siri Hustvedt as well as new texts by Dietmar Elger and Mark Godfrey. Dieter Schwarz will speak at the exhibition opening on 19 January, 2023.
Sies + Hoke
Dusseldorf, Germany
