EVALUATION OF PHOTOREALISTIC AND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONS IN GERHARD RICHTER WORKS

Abstract

Gerhard Richter, who experiences different styles, production methods and methods together in his works; offers the audience different variations in artistic orientation and expressions. Gerhard Richter draws his own artistic boundaries with photorealistic paintings in which images and representations are reflected exactly, and abstract works created with an informal shaping attitude. While photographs, digital prints, blurring images are encountered in his photorealistic works, textured and vibrant colors are encountered in his abstract works. While Gerhard Richter includes figures, portraits, family photographs and landscapes in which grays are intense, with the traces of social associations formed in memory in the photorealistic period, he reflects the authentic values on the canvas surface in an ambiguous way. The abstract canvases reflecting the physicality and the intensity of the composition of colors, on the other hand, appear as the continuation, reflection and alteration of photographs, blur and ambiguity. In the research, it is aimed to examine the periods of the artist, which starts with photography and ends with abstract works, with production methods and methods. Diversity in production and styling, content representations reflected in the transformation of photographic images into pictorial forms; It turns into covered narratives with the transfer of the traces in the artist's memory to the artwork. The literature on Gerhard Richter and his works was scanned and the available data were analyzed with a descriptive method. In both periods shaped by social influence and spiritual impressions, it is observed that the artist diversified his production and included the language of expression shaped in concrete or abstract form through experimental practices in his works. Keywords: Gerhard Richter, photorealism, photography, abstract expressionism