Exhibition catalogue with an essay by Dietmar Elger
Joint opening Galerien Flingern Saturday, 15 January 2022, 12 – 7 pm in accordance with COVID-19 regulations: www.galerien-flingern.de
On the occasion of Gerhard Richter’s ninetieth birthday on 9 February 2022, SCHÖNEWALD is presenting an extensive exhibition featuring 51 watercolours by the artist dating from 1977 to 1997. The exhibition will be on view from 15 January to 19 February 2022. This presentation offers the opportunity to experience Richter’s sensitive watercolours extensively and retrospectively for the first time in more than ten years. The works on display are predominantly loans from private collections. Watercolours are rare in Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre and, with the exception of two early sheets from 1964, were created exclusively between 1977 and 1997.
With their stylistic expression and motivic diversity, the predominantly abstract watercolours accompany the development of the simultaneously executed large-format Abstract Paintings. The sheets were created in groups with clear temporal intervals. Before his last watercolours created in 1997, for example, Richter had not painted any works in this genre for five years. The watercolours are characterised by, among other things, their rejection of any traditional rules. Richter not only used common typewriter paper, but always applied the paint in an unconventional manner. And as with his Abstract Paintings, with the watercolours he left plenty of room and free play to chance in the working process.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden on 9 February 1932. He fled to West Germany in 1961 and studied at the State Academy of Art in Düsseldorf through 1964, later teaching there as a professor of painting from 1971 to 1994. Recent important exhibitions have been held at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam (2018), The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2020), and the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest (2021). Gerhard Richter has lived and worked in Cologne since 1983.
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