by The strength and pleasure of Gerhard Richter’s work lies in its unlimitedness, its variety, its sneakiness, its dependence on inner compulsion and intelligence. Contradictory, antithetical, incompatible: Richter moves from one way of working to another, in an exhibition that fills two floors of David Zwirner in London. This could almost be a group show rather than the work of a single artist. Richter won’t be pinned down, and he still wants to surprise himself, even as he approaches his 92nd birthday next month.
As usual, Richter built a scale model of the gallery in his studio and planned the show in detail. The earliest work was done here in 2010, the latest in August last year. Richter is leading us, first one way, then another. Heavy-duty and scratched-down abstraction gives way to a highly reflective glass surface that reflects the room. But behind the glass is a reproduction of one of Richter’s skull paintings, the skull facing the side and being caught up in its own reflection, along with the other works behind our backs. A small mirrored exterior reveals an impenetrable gray beneath a surface marked with a horizontal and vertical line, while upstairs a polished mirror opens up a larger virtual space beyond our reflection. Here I am, but where am I?
Some Richters you look at, others you look into. Some invite very close inspection while others throw you off in a blitz of ragged and scratched, red scabby backs. The curled clots and trapped flows of colored magma-like lacquer, trapped on an aluminum surface behind their glass frames, have a geologic and almost gemstone-like liquid quality, intended but unstable. Something stirs here, a whole world taunting geological weather systems. It feels like a deep dive beneath the surface of one of his squeeze knife and putty abstractions, with its detached and scraped layers. It is difficult to see exactly how these small works are made. The technique seems to be related to monoprinting and the surrealist technique of decalcomania. Colors fuse and split, slide and conglomerate.
A huge 10 meter wide ink jet strip painting (Richter’s are paintings rather than digital prints) in the upper gallery immediately draws you in and blows you away. Letting the horizontal stripes fill my field of vision, I nearly fell. There’s nowhere to go completely back to see the whole thing straight, so your view is always off or close to you. I stood there and wobbled, my eyes slewing along the racing lines. As narrow as a hair or as wide as a finger, the lines of color offer a multitude of horizons. Some colors attack, some retreat, some like a bass string, some like a garotte. The lines are as precise and laser-tight, and there are far too many to count. It’s all going on in front of me, down on my knees and over my head, in my peripheral vision and maybe even in my ears. This is all great, but I can’t take the phenomenological overload for long.
The strip painting process begins with a scan of one of Richter’s own abstract works, a section of which is halved and mirrored on a computer, then halved and projected again and again until the lines become visible. If it continued the process it would have some kind of visual white noise. Ten years ago, Richter told me he had stopped doing the strip paintings, as well as the flow paintings he did, of which the smaller lacquer-behind-glass works here seem to be miniatures. He was just moving the paint around until it felt right, he told me then. “My dream is to close the door and paint,” he said. “Small paintings, maybe abstracts, maybe landscapes.” Richter made his last large-scale abstractions in 2017.
Some drawings are incomprehensible rambles, following paths known only to the artist
Whatever else he was doing, he was mostly drawing, working with ink and pencil on cheap A4 paper. Here are several long rows of these drawings, each precisely dated, as if they were a diary. His drawings are full of mappings, judderings, contours, strange coagulations, smears and rubs. Sometimes, Richter uses a solvent to manipulate the graphite and move things around. There are smudges and glowerings, areas of frottage, contours and horizon. In one, something like a sheep’s head looks back at me, and it surprises me to see me as I am. In other cases, heads are outlined in profile, silhouetted. Lines of control form an indeterminate quarter of space, sharing an undifferentiated flatness, like the borders that go this way and the border between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Here, they finish nothing.
Some of the drawings are incredible wanderings, following paths that the artist only knows or does not like to know, to guide a single space that he sees, having derived a posture across a piece of ordinary typed paper. The drawings mix sensitivity with curiosity, intention and spontaneity. I find body parts, legs and thighs and something as gnarly as a canker on a tree trunk. Sometimes it’s like finding faces in the clouds. Imagination – our imagination as well as the artist’s imagination – insists that it has its way. Caught in the current between perception and projection, we keep finding things that aren’t there, and trying to find what’s right in front of us. In his drawings, Richter is a man at a desk with a piece of paper in a pool of light, and that is all there is to it.
• At David Zwirner, London, until 28 March.
