The Tate Modern Presents a Retrospective of German Artist Gerhard Richter

Written by Terrence Blackstock Monday, 26 September 2011 21:50

London.- Tate Modern is proud to present "Gerhard Richter: Panorama", on view at the museum from October 6th through January 8th 2012. Gerhard Richter (b 1932) is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today. Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective that will group together significant moments of his remarkable career. Since the 1960s, Gerhard Richter has immersed himself in a rich and varied exploration of painting. Continually challenging the relevance of the medium, his practice has encompassed a diverse range of techniques and ideas.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama will highlight the full extent of the artist's oeuvre. It will include realist paintings based on photographs, colourful gestural abstractions such as the squeegee paintings, portraits, subtle landscapes and history paintings. Richter also works with other media and materials to address the status of painting, for instance over-painting his own photographs or photographing details of his own paintings. Punctuating the exhibition will be a series of glass constructions from 1960s, 1970s and 2000s and mirror works that Richter began making in the 1980s. Gerhard Richter was one of the first German artists to reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims of, the Nazi party. In the late 1980s, looking back to the history of radical political activity in West Germany in the 1970s, he produced the 15-part work October 18 1977 1988, a sequence of black and white paintings based on images of the Baader Meinhof group. Richter has continued to respond to significant moments in history throughout his career. The final room of the exhibition will include September 2005, a painting of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama will include a rarely-shown painting of the Alps from 1968 as well as a magisterial triptych of Cloud paintings from the early 1970s. The Skull and Candle paintings from the 1980s will be shown alongside paintings of icebergs and mountainscapes testifying to Richter’s admiration of German Romantic painting. A highlight of the exhibition will be a range of Richter’s portraits, including intimate images of friends and family. The painted busts of himself and his friend, the artist Blinky Palermo will feature as well as paintings such as Ema (Nude on a Staircase) 1966 depicting his first wife descending a staircase; Betty 1988 a portrait of his daughter and Reader 1994, a painting of his young wife. Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and after training in the East, moved to West Germany in 1961. He was part of a group of painters working in Düsseldorf, that included Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, who turned to image-based painting having explored the emergence of American Pop art. As well as tackling the relationship of painting to the photographic image, Richter also confronted the situation of painting after Marcel Duchamp and the complex legacies of Modernist abstract art.


Located in central London on the banks of the river Thames, the Tate Modern is one of the family of four Tate galleries which display selections from the Tate Collection (named for Sir Henry Tate, a Victorian sugar merchant, whose donation formed the basis of the modern collection). Created in 2000 from a disused power station, the Tate Modern displays the national collection of international modern art, defined as art since 1900. By about 1990 it was clear that the Tate Collection had hugely outgrown the original Tate Gallery on Millbank. It was decided to create a new gallery in London to display the international modern component of the Tate Collection. For the first time London would have a dedicated museum of modern art. The Bankside power station had closed in 1982 and was available, a striking and distinguished building in its own right, it was in an amazing location on the south bank of the River Thames opposite St Paul's Cathedral and the City of London. An international architectural competition was held attracting entries from practices all over the world. The final choice was Herzog and De Meuron, a relatively small and then little known Swiss firm (who have subsequently won the Pritzker Prize). A key factor in this choice was that their proposal retained much of the essential character of the building. The power station was originally designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also created Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral, University libraries in Oxford and Cambridge, Waterloo Bridge, and the design of the famous British red telephone box. The Tate Modern opened in 2000 and became an instant hit with visitors from worldwide. Designed to handle up to 2 million visitors a year, it rapidly became the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 5 million visitors every year. Further expansion of the gallery has been a priority for some time, and a new extension is scheduled to open in 2012. Also designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the new extension will take the form of a ziggurat or pyramid with a sloping brick facade to match the original building. When completed, this will include galleries dedicated to photography, video, exhibitions and the community. The Tate collection of modern and contemporary art represents all the major movements from Fauvism onward. It includes important masterpieces by both Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse and one of the world's finest museum collections of Surrealism, including works by Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and Joan Mirò. Its substantial holdings of American Abstract Expressionism include major works by Jackson Pollock as well as the nine Seagram Murals by Mark Rothko. There is an in depth collection of the Russian pioneer of abstract art Naum Gabo, and an important group of sculpture and paintings by Giacometti. Tate has significant collections of Pop Art, including major works by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, also great examples of Minimal and Conceptual art. Tate also has particularly rich holdings of contemporary art since the 1980's. Visit the museum’s website at: … http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/

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