Exceptional Works: Gerhard Richter

Featured on the occasion of Art Basel Paris, Gerhard Richter’s Familie im Schnee (Family in the Snow) (1966), is directly based on a black-and-white photograph of an unknown couple and their two children posing in front of a snow-covered landscape. The family depicted is frozen in time. This work has remained in the same private collection for the past fifty years.

Art historian Robert Storr explains that snow has been a consistent artistic motif throughout Richter's paintings: “In his paintings of the late 1990s [snow] has filled the air to the point of nearly atomizing the landscape beyond, or come to rest on the roof tops, tree branches and the ground like a cloud of sodden cotton. In the 1980s it blocked high mountain passes and formed icebergs, and in the 1960s and 1970s snow became the brightest end of a tonal spectrum ending in black that Richter deployed in nearly abstract, board-brush studies of the Himalayas and the Alps.”

Storr elaborates on the present work by saying, “Early in his [Richter’s] career snow figures in another type of image; the family snapshot…. In this instance, the stiffness of the pose and the hard sparseness of the sunlit background are softened by the blur of strokes with which the scene is rendered, as if one were gazing at it through the screen of lingering flurries. The impact of the brush, if one can use that word to describe something so soft—soft like a snow flake?—diffuses the images and so accents the inevitable disappearance of what we see, and the erosion of being and of memory within the confines of a rectangle intended to eternally preserve both. In this way Nature, the camera and the brush conspire to undo representation and unravel the past.”

The Liechti family, depicted in Richter’s Familie Liechti (The Liechti Family) (1966), were the past owners of the present painting.

^{Additional featured works by the artist © Gerhard Richter 2024.}