Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. Gerhard Richter. Malerei nach dem Subjekt der Geschichte

Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History comments chronologically in eighteen chapters, previously written as individual essays and now expanded and revised, on Gerhard Richter's most important works, from Elbe (1957) to Birkenau (2020). The essays attempt to trace the particular historical and aesthetic determinants of an extremely heterogeneous oeuvre. This oeuvre has both formulated the semiology of an autonomous painting and marked the ideological and historical boundaries of abstraction in astonishing historical citations of figuration. At the same time, the essays follow the contradictions of a practice that performs a painterly memorial work of specifically German history while demonstrating the increasingly global parameters of art as spectacle and the sheer inexhaustible production of surplus value. In ever-new dialogues with modernist art history, from German Romanticism to Duchamp, from the photographic archive to glass architecture, and from Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol to conceptual art, Richter's oeuvre has initiated a fundamentally different perception of the second half of the 20th century. No methodological coherence can correspond to the artist's divergent practice; the heterodoxly different theoretical and historical approaches of the essays attempted to correspond, at least to some extent, to the open structure of the oeuvre and the individual works.