Gerhard Richter — Panorama — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 6 → September 24, 2012

Gerhard Richter — Panorama La rétrospective du Centre Pompidou consacrée au peintre allemand Gerhard Richter signe un commissariat remarquable et éclaire bril... 3 - Bravo Critique

Panorama 07/12 Du Centre Pompidou au Louvre en passant par le Palais de Tokyo, la rédaction pose un regard sans concession sur les expositions franciliennes du mois de juillet.

Sept En juillet, Slash fête le mélange des genres en faisant un pied de nez aux sirènes de l’été ; c’est en effet la notion du travail de l’artiste qui est à l’honneur ce mois-ci.

From June 6th 2012, the Centre Pompidou pays tribute to Gerhard Richter, one of the great figures of contemporary painting. The result of a team effort with London’s Tate Modern, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Panorama retrospective at the Centre Pompidou brings together a selection of 150 major works by Gerhard Richter. The artist has been fully involved in the original design conceived specifically for the exhibition which offers a double insight, both chronological and thematic, into his career from the 1960’s until his most recent works.

Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1977 Huile sur toile — 30 × 40 cm © Museum Ludwig, Cologne — Collection particulière © Gerhard Richter, 2012

“I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no programme, no style, no direction. I like the indefinite, the boundless. I like continual uncertainty.” Gerhard Richter has this uncanny ability to reinvent and transform himself, and yet every time to push his work into a new direction and to promote a new vision of painting and of art history. Ever since the start of his career, Gerhard Richter has been experimenting with radically different pictorial styles. Thus, moving away in the seventies from the “photo-paintings” he had created from photographs in the early sixties, Richter embraced a new form of abstraction in which he blended colour grids, gestural abstraction and monochromes. All through the 1980’s he kept reinventing the historical genres of the portrait, landscape and historical painting, imbuing them with his own erudite and innovative manner. At the same time, he was also exploring a new kind of abstract paintings suffused with acid colours in which geometric and gestural shapes dissolve. In the 1990s, the artist fine-tuned what would become his signature technique of spreading wet paint with a large wooden or metal board.