Abstract
For nearly six decades, Gerhard Richter has challenged the conceptual and visual limits of contemporary painting. His 2011 work Strip overloads the viewer’s visual perception. Richter created this unique digital print using a process that deliberately employs chance to circumvent the artist’s authorship. This article examines the history of Richter’s skepticism of creative authority and the strategies he has developed to realize an art that exceeds the limits of human skill and imagination. Although he remains an atheist, Richter frames his pursuit of an incomprehensible art in terms of a longing for a belief in God.
Highlights
For nearly six decades, Gerhard Richter has challenged the conceptual and visual limits of contemporary painting
He remains an atheist, Richter frames his pursuit of an incomprehensible art in terms of a longing for a belief in God
The process of creating Strip is simultaneously logical and random, methodical and intuitive. Richter documented this process of artist-directed chance in a book Gerhard Richter: Patterns: Divided, Mirrored, Repeated
Summary
Measuring 200 × 440 cm, Strip is composed of countless thin horizontal bands of different colors These lines are perfectly straight, parallel, and run from one edge of the work to the other. The work immediately announces itself as a digital creation While these perfectly straight and parallel threads of color seem to run from one edge of the work to the other without interruption, Strip, has a midpoint divide. These 1998 and 2011 interviews bracket the genesis of Richter’s Strip Paintings series, and suggest the direction of Richter’s thinking that brought him to Strip While he aspires for his art to have metaphysical content, Richter achieves this spiritual aim through material and rational means, by extending material and logic beyond itself. If the incomprehensibility of any structure in a work of art is its measure of metaphysical effect, Strip is absolutely metaphysical
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