VILNIUS - At a time when many in the art world proclaim that "painting is dead" in the modern era of technological media, Gerhard Richter uses photography 's painting's modern counterpart in the depiction of reality 's as a foil of contrast to painting.
Now a new exhibition at Lithuania's biggest gallery dedicated to modern art, introduces one of Europe's most well-known artists, together with the fusion of painting and photography that he pioneered.
Richter's style is to enlarge otherwise barely detectable details from photographs and then paint them, creating entirely different images altogether.
Two of Richter's later "photo-paintings" on display at the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, "Ophelia" and "Guildenstern," both created in 1996, are zoomed-in elements from a much broader original photograph of the artist's palette.
The riot of colors run and blend into each other, the occasional tiny air bubbles fabricating points of focus, so that this anarchy of color recalls the cosmic images beamed back to Earth from the Hubble space telescope.
Like much of his best work, "Ophelia" and "Guildenstern" are magnified details from the random disorder and confusion of reality, enlarged so that they become absolutely abstract.
Richter himself has said that he exploits this use of photographic imagery as a way of escaping the mundane process faced by all artists in deciding what to paint. Over the years, he has amassed thousands of photographs, many of them from magazines and newspapers, as starting points for his artwork.
His reproductions of the original photos, together with all their lack of sharp definition, point to the fact that they often come from the banal realms of pictures in the mass media and amateur photography.
But Richter's overall motives remain vague and mysterious. As he said in 1966, "I have no intentions, no system, no style, no particular case or message."
His subjects are frequently reduced to tones of gray, like the photographs they have been captured in. In his so-called 'Grey Pictures' of the late 1960s, they completely disappear in the color gray. For Richter, this is the color of indifference, of nothing. He later returned to color and the abstract paintings he made in the 1980s.
Another picture in the Vilnius exhibition, "Betty" (1991), is a "portrait" painted from a photograph of the artist's daughter. In what seems to be a subversion of the banality of high-street portrait photography, the focus is on the dramatic twist of the girl's shoulders as she faces in the opposite direction. Instead of looking at the "camera" and at her audience, she turns away to face a wall of gray.
This grayness she gazes into could in fact be one of her father's monochrome abstractions. The painting might be intended as a representation, however indecipherable, of the relationship between father and daughter.
Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. He trained as a painter and between the ages of 19 and 24 he participated in the socialist-realist public mural projects beloved by the German Democratic Republic(GDR) authorities. He was quite successful, but grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of artistic freedom.
In 1961, Richter left the GDR for good, eventually finding himself in Dusseldorf and later Cologne. His controversial 113 sq m stained glass abstract collage of squares in 72 colors, the squares randomly arranged by computer, was unveiled at Cologne Cathedral in 2007.
His most recent retrospective opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art before touring many of the most prestigious art galleries in North America and Europe. It was this 2005 exhibition that secured his reputation as one of the most important artists of the 20th century.
Gerhard Richter's "Survey" is at the Contemporary Art Center, Vokieciu 2, until May 11, 2008.
