This exhibition at The Met Bauer considers Richter Gerhard’s six decade long preoccupation with the dual means of representation and abstraction to explore the material, conceptual, and historical implications of painting.
Spanning the entirety of Richter’s prolific and innovative career, the exhibition will present over one hundred works that focus on his specific commitment to the medium, as well as his related interests in photography, digital reproduction, and sculpture.
Richter practices the dual means of representation and abstraction in painting to explore not only the nature of the medium but also its conceptual and historical implications. While these two modes of working are sometimes characterized in oppositional terms, he has famously embraced both, sometimes simultaneously, finding expressive pictorial possibilities in the tension between them. Throughout, he has tested the ability of art to reckon with personal history, collective memory, and identity, particularly in the context of post World War II German society.