Gerhard Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation.
In 2002 Gerhard Richter was included in a conversation about the restoration of the great gothic cathedral of Cologne. The building had survived the “thousand-bomber” raids that flattened the city in 1942, but the stained glass of the enormous tracery window in the south transept had been lost, and the cathedral chapter now wanted to replace the plain-glass postwar repairs with something that lived up to the building’s spectacular presence and spiritual purpose—ideally, a work by a major artist, commemorating victims of Nazism.
Richter was, in one sense, an obvious choice—one of Germany’s most prominent artists, he had lived in Cologne for years. In other ways, the decision was curious. Richter is not religious, and while his work had made glancing references to the Third Reich, his position on the often reflexive commemoration of war crimes was not uncomplicated. For the cathedral, he considered, then rejected, the possibility of transmuting Nazi execution photographs into stained glass. Instead he turned to a 1974 painting of randomly arranged color squares, part of a series that had included paintings, prints, and a design for commercial carpeting. Cologne’s archbishop, who had wanted something demonstrably—even exclusively—Christian, did not attend the unveiling. But while Richter’s window is, in theory, a reprise—its approximately 11,500 color squares were arranged by algorithm and tweaked by the artist to remove any suggestion of symbols or ciphers—the experience it provides is utterly distinct. The squares are made of glass using medieval recipes, they rise collectively some seventy-five feet, and are part of a gothic cathedral. When the sun shines through and paints floors, walls, and people with moving color, the effect is aleatoric, agnostic, and otherworldly. It should mean nothing, and feels like it could mean everything.