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Lot Essay
The view in Passage (Leipzig), painted in 1990, is infused by a crisp perfection that appears perfectly suited to Richter's artistic process and beliefs. As a photorealist picture dating from a period when Richter was mainly painting Abstracts, Passage (Leipzig) forms an explicit clear foil to his Abstracts, cutting to the heart of his investigations into the paradoxical nature of painting.
With the young trees in the foreground, and the sparse paved space in the middle-ground, Passage (Leipzig) is filled with the sheen of new architectural development. There is a feeling of optimism and potential, yet at the same time there is an intense sterility to the picture, punctuated only vaguely by the strolling couple and the bicycle in the extreme right. Richter's choice of source image appears essentially underwhelming. He has deliberately selected a picture that has little drama to recommend it. This is a far cry from the world of Pop, to which Richter's art is a strange and subversive cousin. Where Warhol's reproductions of found images were usually filled with the frenzied fizz of advertising, Richter deliberately selects more mundane images for his paintings.
Richter uses another root of Pop - this is not the world of popular images that surrounds the modern viewer, but instead the more intimate world of our own snap shots, family photography, and discarded images of new buildings. Richter's Pop is popular on the most domestic, and democratic, scale. However much optimism may be implied by this sleek new building in Leipzig, there is little of the aspiration (or satirisation of it) that characterises so much American Pop. In Passage (Leipzig), there is something infinitely more subtle, more cynical and more European at work.
A key influence in Richter's photorealist paintings, as well as for Warhol, was the work of Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptual art and the greatest proponent of the use of readymades. For what is Passage (Leipzig), a painting of a photograph, if not an adaptation of the readymade? Indeed, the fact that Richter has meticulously and painstakingly reproduced a photograph in oils emphasises the common and readymade status of the source image. 'Everything made since Duchamp has been a readymade, even when hand-painted' (Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, ed. H.-U. Obrist, trans. D. Britt, London, 1995, p.101), says Richter, but rather than struggle against such an overwhelming legacy, he has embraced it.
Passage (Leipzig) resembles an architectural drawing with added trees and humans. There is therefore a ring of artificiality even in the source image, let alone the finished result. This artificiality cuts to the heart of Richter's photorealist paintings, and his extensive explorations and experimentations into the nature and limitations of art. In Passage (Leipzig), he explores the arbitrary nature of representation and especially painting. He does this by blurring the lines between painting, an old and essentially classical artform, and photography. Richter has essentially become an extension of photography by reproducing the image in oils on a larger scale. He has deliberately and perversely reduced the role of the painter to that of an automaton, not even a mechanic, but a mechanism. The act of slavishly reproducing a photograph is made all the more arbitrary by the lack of engaging activity in either the source or the final images. He has removed personality and inspiration from the role of the artist, deliberately subjugating the time-honoured act of painting to modernity and photography.
This negation of the role of the painter is a deeply personal act for Richter, who is after all a painter and proud to be one. However, as though constantly in awe of the skills that he himself possesses, Richter repeatedly explores the very building blocks of art. Passage (Leipzig) was painted in 1990, a year in which almost all of his oil output was in the form of abstract paintings. Richter's abstracts and his photorealist paintings are like two sides of the same coin, each almost mechanically created, each minimising its own ability to transmit information. The abstract paintings are meticulously created over a length of time in order to remove every semblance of emotion or of visual information, thereby allowing Richter to create striking, often beautiful paintings that are nonetheless emphatically not pictures. Conversely, his photorealist pictures convey visual information that is selected for its random, and often banal, content. There is little enriching in the view of the buildings in Leipzig. There is little information of use in the view before us: 'The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source' (Richter, quoted in ibid., pp.30-31). Richter's painting echoes Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim that 'The medium is the message' (McLuhan, Understanding Media, New York, 1964, chapter 1) - it is the act of reproducing a photograph, rather than the photograph itself, that contains meaning in Passage (Leipzig).
With the young trees in the foreground, and the sparse paved space in the middle-ground, Passage (Leipzig) is filled with the sheen of new architectural development. There is a feeling of optimism and potential, yet at the same time there is an intense sterility to the picture, punctuated only vaguely by the strolling couple and the bicycle in the extreme right. Richter's choice of source image appears essentially underwhelming. He has deliberately selected a picture that has little drama to recommend it. This is a far cry from the world of Pop, to which Richter's art is a strange and subversive cousin. Where Warhol's reproductions of found images were usually filled with the frenzied fizz of advertising, Richter deliberately selects more mundane images for his paintings.
Richter uses another root of Pop - this is not the world of popular images that surrounds the modern viewer, but instead the more intimate world of our own snap shots, family photography, and discarded images of new buildings. Richter's Pop is popular on the most domestic, and democratic, scale. However much optimism may be implied by this sleek new building in Leipzig, there is little of the aspiration (or satirisation of it) that characterises so much American Pop. In Passage (Leipzig), there is something infinitely more subtle, more cynical and more European at work.
A key influence in Richter's photorealist paintings, as well as for Warhol, was the work of Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptual art and the greatest proponent of the use of readymades. For what is Passage (Leipzig), a painting of a photograph, if not an adaptation of the readymade? Indeed, the fact that Richter has meticulously and painstakingly reproduced a photograph in oils emphasises the common and readymade status of the source image. 'Everything made since Duchamp has been a readymade, even when hand-painted' (Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, ed. H.-U. Obrist, trans. D. Britt, London, 1995, p.101), says Richter, but rather than struggle against such an overwhelming legacy, he has embraced it.
Passage (Leipzig) resembles an architectural drawing with added trees and humans. There is therefore a ring of artificiality even in the source image, let alone the finished result. This artificiality cuts to the heart of Richter's photorealist paintings, and his extensive explorations and experimentations into the nature and limitations of art. In Passage (Leipzig), he explores the arbitrary nature of representation and especially painting. He does this by blurring the lines between painting, an old and essentially classical artform, and photography. Richter has essentially become an extension of photography by reproducing the image in oils on a larger scale. He has deliberately and perversely reduced the role of the painter to that of an automaton, not even a mechanic, but a mechanism. The act of slavishly reproducing a photograph is made all the more arbitrary by the lack of engaging activity in either the source or the final images. He has removed personality and inspiration from the role of the artist, deliberately subjugating the time-honoured act of painting to modernity and photography.
This negation of the role of the painter is a deeply personal act for Richter, who is after all a painter and proud to be one. However, as though constantly in awe of the skills that he himself possesses, Richter repeatedly explores the very building blocks of art. Passage (Leipzig) was painted in 1990, a year in which almost all of his oil output was in the form of abstract paintings. Richter's abstracts and his photorealist paintings are like two sides of the same coin, each almost mechanically created, each minimising its own ability to transmit information. The abstract paintings are meticulously created over a length of time in order to remove every semblance of emotion or of visual information, thereby allowing Richter to create striking, often beautiful paintings that are nonetheless emphatically not pictures. Conversely, his photorealist pictures convey visual information that is selected for its random, and often banal, content. There is little enriching in the view of the buildings in Leipzig. There is little information of use in the view before us: 'The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source' (Richter, quoted in ibid., pp.30-31). Richter's painting echoes Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim that 'The medium is the message' (McLuhan, Understanding Media, New York, 1964, chapter 1) - it is the act of reproducing a photograph, rather than the photograph itself, that contains meaning in Passage (Leipzig).