Gerhard Richter is a German artist and most prominently a painter, while he has also produced photorealistic paintings, and photographs which appear painterly or have been altered with paint. Again, this is an artist whose work links to the intermediatlity concept running through my work currently.
Richter’s photographic work relies on it’s technique to demostrate an improvised “blur”. Firstly the artist takes a photograph of his subject, he then projects this image onto his canvas and traces it for a painting. After the image has been painted, a squeegee is used to drag the wet paint across the surface of the image, ‘blurring’ the result. While this may have underlying concepts of identity I am more interested in the crossover between the two artforms, and the way in which a false perception of movement is produced.
Sometimes the effect is subtle, while in other images it becomes much more abstract and noticable. In these more abstract works we are forced to view a realistic photographic work of a city or other landscape as a series of smears and lines, with a large pallet of colours similar to that presented in the original image. While it may not be a direct copy of the original, neither was the photograph which the painting was based on, it was merely a copy, and in these pieces, we see a copy of the copy produced and manipulated, questioning the originals reality and our perception of the space.