The first full-scale monographic study in English of one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century.

In this first full-scale monograph in English on the German painter Gerhard Richter, the distinguished art historian Benjamin HD. Buchloh maps the unfolding of Richter’s ever more complex and contradictory lifework. A painter in an age that disdains painting, a German confronting the impossibility of representing the historical trauma inflicted by his country upon the world between 1933 and 1945, a European artist in dialogue with his American counterparts, Richter (b.

1932) is shown by Buchloh to be a unique and singular artist, outside and beyond every other formation contemporaneous with his own development and evolution.
 
What emerges from Buchloh’s detailed analysis of Richter’s key works is a far more complex set of painterly strategies than has been previously assumed, strategies that have inverted and relativized all the principles of the modernist and even the postmodernist painterly aestheticIn a series of essays that proceeds chronologically, Buchloh begins with Elbe (1957), seeing it as a foundational moment in Richter’s confrontation with Socialist Realism, and goes on to consider such works as October 18, 1977 (1988), the series of representational photo-based paintings of Baader-Meinhof members; Richter’s glass works; and the late group of Birkenau Paintings (2014).

Richly illustrated in color, dense with insights that represent half a lifetime of engagement with Richter’s work, this book will stand as the definitive, essential examination of a major contemporary artist.


Format Häftad Omfång 528 sidor Språk Engelska Förlag MIT Press Ltd Utgivningsdatum 2022-09-06 ISBN 9780262543538