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may 30, 2019 - Guggenheim Bilbao
Gerhard Richter. 'Seascapes' at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Gerhard Richter. Seascapes
Dates: May 23–September 9, 2019
Curated by Lucía Agirre, Curator, #guggenheimmuseumbilbao
Gallery 304 (third floor)
- Over the course of three decades, Richter created seascapes in different formats, colors, and styles: from abstract seascapes in which the horizon can barely be made out to those in which the photographic realism of the sky is only nuanced by an ambiguous light.
- Shrouded in clouds or totally still, his skies occupy much of the canvas in his seascapes and are only occasionally eclipsed by the sea.
- Richter seeks to create the perfect image and draws from the sky and the sea at different times in an illusory composition in which perspective and light manage to ensnare the viewer.
The #guggenheimmuseumbilbao presents #gerhardrichter. Seascapes, a unique chance to view the largest set of his celebrated seascapes ever assembled to date. Richter’s seascapes are not mere depictions of nature. On the one hand, they challenge the viewer’s perception by painting in a way that resembles photography. Richter manages to achieve an extraordinarily smooth surface by applying highly diluted pigment, and blurs the image, as happens in some snapshots. On the other hand, Richter embellishes the landscape in his quest for perfection: in some works, the sky and the sea actually come from two different images that he fuses, becoming almost interchangeable and thus leaving the viewer to identify each of them.
Gerhard Richter was born shortly before the outbreak of the World War II in Dresden, which would become a part of East Germany following the end of the conflict. His interest in the Informalism and Expressionism developing on the other side of the Iron Curtain quickly led him to abandon his hometown. In 1961, he moved to Düsseldorf, where he met Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo, and Konrad Fischer, among other artists. Even though Richter had made several paintings based on photographs before then, he considered the works he made after 1962 his first photo paintings. In his quest for a “new beginning,” these new works signal a turning point in his career.
At first the sea served as the backdrop for his portraits, shots which come from a family album. These forerunners include beach scenes like Renate and Marianne (Renate und Marianne, 1964), in which he shows his wife and sister-in-law on the sand, or Family at the Seaside (Familie am Meer, 1964), another blurry family portrait in which the figure of his father-in-law dominates the scene. Shortly thereafter in Deckchair (Liegestuhl, 1964), the human body becomes vaguely hinted at, and viewers are unable to identify the model, as they could in his earlier works. In 1965, he made a small landscape in gray tones merging figuration and abstraction, in what we can perhaps boldly consider his first seascape, Landscape (Landschaft, 1965).
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Department of Communications and Marketing Tel: +34 944 359 008 media@guggenheim-bilbao.eus www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus
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P 241 1 2
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Richter Seestuck bewolt
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