Richter is known to become frustrated at not achieving the close-focus precision he often aspires to. Richter was drawn to Duchamp’s “conclusions about the incapacities of painting” and Ema was painted with extraordinary sensitivity, even modifying the light source of the original staged photograph, so as to allow the figure to emerge forward. Now known as the “Mona-Lisa of Cologne”, it was Richter’s response to seeing a Marcel Duchamp exhibition in 1965 and his famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912.
Using his pioneering blurring technique, she is before our eyes but as though hidden behind a veil. The figure is of Richter’s first wife, Marianne Eufinger (Ema), two months pregnant. The painting reveals a life-sized naked woman descending a staircase, possibly asleep. An example of his astounding photo-paintings, it provoked one Berlin museum director to reject it in 1967 on the grounds that he “did not collect photos, but paintings.” Once the victim of a knife-attack it now hangs behind unbreakable glass at the Ludwig Museum. We take a look at some of the standout works included in the exhibition.Įma (Akt auf einer Treppe), Ema (Nude on a Staircase), 1966Ĭonsidered by many to be one of his key works, Ema, 1966, also remains one of his most controversial. Now alongside 26 new paintings created last year, many pioneering works will be on show from the Ludwig Museum’s permanent collection. As well as the most expensive-in 2015 his painting Abstraktes Bild (599) attained the astounding price of $46.3 million at Sotheby’s auction house. Since his move to Düsseldorf, Richter has never looked back, and he enjoys international acclaim as the finest painter of the 21st century. This was in 1961, a matter of months before the building of the Berlin wall. After the war-and despite being supported as an artist in the GDR-he grew frustrated at the limitations put upon him, and after seeing Jackson Pollock’s work in documenta II, he and his first wife Ema fled to the West. His mother’s brother was killed fighting and her younger sister, Marianne, a schizophrenic, was starved to death in a Nazi euthanasia camp. As a 13-year-old boy, he saw the glow as Dresden burned during World War II. His backstory is nothing short of extraordinary. For over 60 years he has relentlessly scrutinized the viability of contemporary painting in the age of digital reproducibility, producing conceptually challenging and aesthetically engaging works that interrogate how images that seemingly portray truths, can be wholly untrustworthy and unstable. Glenn Lowry, the director of MoMA in New York, believes that Richter is the author of pictures so “different from one another that at first glance they seem to be by different hands.” Not that anyone could possibly mistake a Richter, his incisive investigations into every facet of human image making could only emanate from him alone. Without adhering to a fixed style, without using expressive gesture or observational truth, Richter reinvigorated the medium of painting, helping him rise to become one of the most prominent artists of our time. This month the German painter Gerhard Richter celebrates his 85th birthday with an exhibition including new paintings at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
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