Name: Press Release
Start: 2023-02-28
End: 2023-04-22
Location: David Zwirner

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, New York, 2023. All artworks and images © Gerhard Richter 2023, courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden, unless otherwise noted

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent work by Gerhard Richter, on view from March 16–April 29, 2023, at 537 West 20th Street in New York.

The exhibition presents a group of Richter’s last paintings, made in 2016–2017; a number of these abstract oil paintings will be shown here for the first time. Though Richter completed his last paintings in 2017, his dynamic practice continues his artistic inquiries into the possibilities of abstraction and perception through his ongoing experimentation with drawing, printing and sculpture.

Richter has produced a new glass installation that continues his exploration of the human perspective and the built environment. An expansive suite of new works on paper from 2021–2022—some made with ink and others with graphite and colored pencil—are also on view, as well as works related to the artist’s mood series of colored ink sketches. As Dieter Schwarz notes, Richter’s new work “has transformed into the celebration of the visible and this celebration is driving new chapters in [his] indefatigable creativity.”

Watch a tour of the artist’s critically-acclaimed solo exhibition at our New York gallery, led by our founder David Zwirner and the celebrated curator and author Dieter Schwarz.

“I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”

—Gerhard Richter, 1966

Gerhard Richter, 3 Scheiben (3 Panes of Glass), 2023 (detail)

Centrally featured in the exhibition is 3 Scheiben (3 Panes of Glass) (2023), a new glass sculpture created this year that comprises three sequential rectangular panes of transparent yet reflective glass—each one positioned upright and measuring almost ten feet in height. The installation invites viewers to look at, through, and beyond its surface, revealing the inherently subjective and situational nature of observed reality.

Gerhard Richter

3 Scheiben (3 Panes of Glass), 2023

Glass and steel construction, three (3) panes of glass

129 1/8 x 86 3/4 x 81 inches (328 x 220.3 x 205.7 cm)

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Richter has maintained an analytical and wide-ranging fascination with glass. His free-standing glass works are positioned as a literal reflection on painting and image-making; they respond to the art-historical notion of the painting as both a mirror and a window, while also acting as a powerful corollary to the blurred effect of Richter’s photo paintings, which the artist began experimenting with in the 1960s.

Installation view, Gerhard Richter’s 4 Glasscheiben (4 Panes of Glass) (1967), on view in It is... it isn't... The Collection of Annick and Anton Herbert, Herbert Foundation, Ghent, 2023. Photo by Philippe De Gobert

Richter first began working with glass over half a century ago, with his landmark 1967 installation 4 Glasscheiben (4 Panes of Glass) which was conceived as a response to The Large Glass (1915–1923) by Marcel Duchamp. As Richter recalled years later, “I think something in Duchamp didn’t suit me—all that mystery-mongering—and that’s why I painted those simple glass panes and showed the whole windowpane problem in a completely different light.”

Gerhard Richter in front of the painting Vorhang IV (Curtain IV), Düsseldorf, 1965. Photo by Gerhard Richter

Installation view, Richter, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, 1967

“Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.”

—Gerhard Richter, 1966

Gerhard Richter, 4 stehende Scheiben (4 Standing Panes), 2002. Collection of Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München. Photo by Simone Gänsheimer

Gerhard Richter, 6 stehende Scheiben (6 Standing Panes), 2002/2011. Collection of Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

The installation in New York belongs to a later body of work comprising groups of freestanding transparent glass panes. Richter began creating these installations in 2002, beginning with 4 Stehende Scheiben (4 Standing Panes), now in the collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich. When viewed head-on, the image that is visible through the glass becomes increasingly distorted, dimmed, and opaque as it passes through each successive panel. As Dietmar Elger observes, in these upright glass works, “Richter gradually dissolved the ‘image’ as a framed detail of reality by increasing the distance to reality through various forms of manipulation, such that the work then took on a reality all its own.”

Gerhard Richter, 12 Scheiben (Reihe) (12 Panes), 2013, Doppelgrau, 2014, and Birkenau, 2014. Collection of Fondation Beyeler, Riehen. Photo by Mark Niedermann

Gerhard Richter, 7 stehende Scheiben (7 Standing Panes), 2002. Collection of High Museum of Art, Atlanta

“One experiences a constant flux of optic interruptions, irritations, and illusions, appearing and disappearing images. The panes create multiple, layered reflections and distortions.”

—Dietmar Elger, director, Gerhard Richter Archive

Gerhard Richter

12.07.2022, 2022

Ink and pencil on paper

8 1/8 x 11 1/2 inches (20.6 x 29.2 cm)
Framed: 13 5/8 x 17 1/2 inches (34.6 x 44.5 cm)

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An expansive suite of new works on paper from 2021–2022—some made with ink, and others with graphite and colored pencil—are also on view in New York. Richter’s drawings constitute a significant element of his practice, allowing him to explore another aspect of the role of the artist’s hand in the creation of a dynamic and abstract pictorial narrative. As Michael Newman notes, “in a series of drawings that have planes at an angle to each other, the planes can be seen as opaque screens that double that of the drawing itself.”

Gerhard Richter

3.Nov.2021, 2021

Pencil on paper

11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches (29.5 x 21 cm)
Framed: 17 3/8 x 13 3/8 inches (44.1 x 34 cm)

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Gerhard Richter

11.07.2022, 2022

Ink and pencil on paper

8 1/8 x 11 1/2 inches (20.6 x 29.2 cm)
Framed: 13 5/8 x 17 1/2 inches (34.6 x 44.5 cm)

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Gerhard Richter’s studio, Cologne, 2022. Photo by Dietmar Elger

Many of these works feature passages of cloudy graphite rubbings juxtaposed with equally hazy semi-erased portions. The artist embeds a sparse network of crisscrossing arcs and lines among this backdrop, forming an enigmatic topography that seems to map out the very possibilities of image-making itself.

Gerhard Richter

19.9.2022 (4), 2022

Ink and pencil on paper

8 1/8 x 11 1/2 inches (20.6 x 29.2 cm)
Framed: 13 5/8 x 17 1/2 inches (34.6 x 44.5 cm)

Other drawings on view are composed of abstract monochrome washes of ink and graphite, taking on a decisively painterly appearance. As Richter describes, these works on paper outline a parallel but complementary path to his painted oeuvre, much like “a poem and a novel by the same author.”

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

The exhibition also brings together a group of Richter’s last oil paintings, made in 2016–2017, a number of which are shown in New York for the first time. Richter stopped making oil paintings in 2017, and the final canvas he made is on view in the exhibition. Part of the artist’s Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings) series—a cornerstone of his practice since the 1970s—the works exemplify Richter’s investigations into chance occurrences and the painted medium’s historical and material properties. With their highly worked and intricately stratified surfaces, the last paintings foreground the sheer physical presence of paint and color, enacting a mode of composition that is aleatory yet deliberately planned.

Gerhard Richter

Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2017

Oil on canvas

78 3/4 x 98 3/8 inches (200 x 250 cm)

“This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration, and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture.… I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a readymade) always possesses.”

—Gerhard Richter, 1990

Gerhard Richter in the studio, film still from Gerhard Richter Painting, 2011, directed by Corinna Belz. Courtesy zero one film GmbH, Berlin

The blurring concealment of Richter’s Abstract Paintings recalls the tension between the medium of glass as a transparent surface and a reflective one and the notion of the picture plane metaphorically functioning as a window or as a mirror, underscoring how Richter interrogates painting in many media and through a range of conceptual frameworks.

Gerhard Richter

Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2016

Oil on wood

15 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (40 x 50 cm)

Installation view, Gerhard Richter’s Cage (3), Cage (1), Cage (4) (2006), on view in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Breuer, New York, 2020

Installation view, Gerhard Richter’s Cage (3), Cage (1), Cage (4) (2006), on view in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All , The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Breuer, New York, 2020

Installation view, Gerhard Richter’s House of Cards (5 Panes) (2019), on view in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Breuer, New York, 2020. Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Installation view, Gerhard Richter’s House of Cards (5 Panes) (2019), on view in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All , The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Breuer, New York, 2020. Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

“The felt analogy between a composed painting and a contemplative viewer is so fundamental that we are not aware of it until it is interfered with. And this is precisely what the glass pieces do: our reflection, in the sense of our mirrored image, disrupts our reflection, in the sense of our contemplation.”

—Hal Foster, art critic and historian

Gerhard Richter

Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2016

Oil on canvas

18 1/8 x 16 1/8 inches (46 x 41 cm)

Gerhard Richter

mood, 2022

Inkjet print on paper in thirty-one (31) parts

Each: 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches (21 x 29.9 cm)
Framed, each: 13 5/8 x 17 1/2 inches (34.6 x 44.5 cm)

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Extending his career-long experiments with the iterative translation and interplay of mediums, Richter created mood, a group of inkjet prints that relate to a recent series of colored ink drawings that debuted together at the Fondation Beyeler in 2022. These vibrant prints are almost indistinguishable from their ink counterparts, revealing Richter’s continued fascination with the possibilities of image reproduction.

Gerhard Richter, mood, 2022 (detail)

In relation to Richter’s glass installations, Hans Ulrich Obrist explains, “the word ‘reflect’ has two planes of meaning which bring the viewer into the picture, and thus the viewer is in two states at once.” This concept of reflection is physically illustrated in Richter’s Fondation Beyeler exhibition, where the prints were installed adjacent to the originals, thus mirroring them.

Installation view, Gerhard Richter’s mood series (2022), on view in Passages – Landscape, Figure and Abstraction, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, 2022. Photo by Mark Niedermann

“This provocative gesture has a certain charm, since scarcely anyone without prior knowledge of them would be in a position to tell the copies from the originals. But by duplicating his images in this way, Richter has also distanced himself from them, since what at first seems random, as a reproduction becomes an incontestable fact.”

—Dieter Schwarz, art historian, curator, and writer

Gerhard Richter, mood, 2022 (detail)

Schwarz notes, “in contrast to the originals, which have only the date of their making as a title, Richter titled the edition of prints mood. The use of an English title in lieu of such corresponding German terms as Laune or Stimmung conjures up memories of jazz —‘In the Mood’—also implies that this voiceless sequence of images is fast becoming a titled object.” Through mood, Richter continues his exploration and fascination with the possibilities of seriality, and optic processing.

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

The mood prints resume the artist’s lifelong concern with boundlessness and the slippage between material and spiritual realms, and between a pure visuality and the instabilities of consciousness. In his essay, “To see everything—to comprehend nothing,” Dieter Schwarz reaffirms Richter’s lineage in German romantic philosophy and painting, with its emphasis on the mediation between nature and mind, and between the world of appearances and that of human understanding.

Gerhard Richter, mood, 2022 (detail)

“I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, and incompleteness.”

—Gerhard Richter, 1972

Gerhard Richter in his studio, Cologne, 1991. Photo by Benjamin Katz, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2023

Gerhard Richter: 100 Abstract Pictures

On the occasion of his exhibition at David Zwirner, Richter will publish a new, limited-run artist’s book that explores abstraction and chance in art and writing.

An artwork of its own, this intimate volume inspires both close looking and a beautiful interpretation of abstraction.

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