Gerhard Richter Painting (2011) by CYNTHIA SIMONIS

1. After watching this film, what does the audience gain in seeing the up close
and personal practice of Gerhard Richter?
Gerhard Richter has a fine tuned sense of patience working with various materials in his
studio. The studio is spacious and well lit. Assistants mix his paint to his desired
consistency.
Any artist can gain knowledge of how Richter uses home-produced squeegees to rub
and scrape the paint that he applies in large bands across his canvases. How much
time, consideration and care he takes. He not only brushes directly on the canvas, but
stands on a ladder and pulls a squeegee across wet paint to create a smear. I was
impressed with the way Richter drew a bead on his brush with the paint, and gradually
coaxed it to a line that had the ability to change colours without adding more paint to the
brush. The result is an equalization of illusion and paint. The dried scrape marks of
both paint brush and squeegee are obvious in the finished painting. It always surprised
me that while he was dealing with splattered paint, he wore gloves, but never got much
paint on his clothes.
2. What did you find yourself focused on while watching this film, and what new
insights did you gain about the reasons Richter paints and why his work
continues to captivate so much attention?
While I watched the film, I was focused on Richters Painting style.
When I look at a painting in this smear style of his, I have the feeling of looking at an out
of focus image that lies provocatively beyond any interpretation that I can procure. I
recognize his feeling of not looking at his finished painting for a few days as Richter
says, my compositions are the heart and soul of my paintings. I wonder what he is
thinking as he pauses before he draws a large squeegee downwards, loaded with
dripping paint. What does he see? I have never witnessed this style of painting process
being performed by an artist before.
3. Finally, make note of what aspects of his practice are postmodern in approach by
referring to one key scene.
Richter created an alternative to his neo-expressionist peers. He created capitalist
realism, an indigenous form of Pop art that responded to American aesthetic

domination, control or hegemony. Postmodernism distorts what appears to be an

American infatuation with capitalism.
Postmodernism questioned the relevance of traditional easel painting. Postmodernism is
a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific or objective efforts to explain reality.
One scene, when Richter was approving the overhead lighting in an exhibition in a Kln
exhibition, he told the designers that the overhead lighting was his biggest worry.
The light is crap but well fix it, Richter was told. We can change that to cold lighting.
Cold or neutral he said. It has to be really cold so people will feel they need to get
out. They shouldnt feel comfortable.
I felt this scene was a terrific example of postmodernism.