Gerhard Richter, London

About

This ARTIST ROOMS display presents Gerhard Richter’s panes of glass and mirrored works, literal reflections on the nature of pictorial representation.

Richter is in many respects a traditional painter, but his work has a strong conceptual core. His paintings are explorations of all the possibilities offered by the medium, whether to reproduce images of reality or to experiment with colours, textures, techniques and gestures. Richter began to use glass in his work in 1967. Like his paintings, these works are concerned with the mechanisms of representation and perception. They are neutral surfaces framing aspects of the world and turning them into pictures. The sculpture '11 Panes' (2004) plays with the material’s ability both to be looked through and to reflect. The transparency of each glass pane, leaning against the wall at a different angle, multiplies reflections as distorted forms that keep shifting as one moves closer or further away from the work. The blurring effect recalls that found in Richter’s figurative paintings. A layer of pigment applied to the back of the glass makes 'Mirror Painting (Grey, 735-2)' (1991) reflect reality as a greyscale picture. It relates directly to Richter’s monochrome grey canvases, one of which can be seen in the minimalism room on Tate Modern's Level 4.