Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

One of the world’s greatest living artists, Gerhard Richter consistently defies conventions as to what one should paint and how, often blurring the lines between media. In the early 1960s, he gained notoriety for his paintings based on smeared photographs. In 1986, Richter began a series of overpainted photographs. By combining the implied truth of the photographic image with abstract gestures, he raises questions about the nature of representation. As Richter said, “Abstract pictures . . . make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.” In this work (our first by the artist) the juxtaposition of thick impasto paint on his color photograph of a forest encourages us to draw our own inferences as to their relationship.