A photograph is sort of imprisoned reality, with its own light and shade, its own contours and depth. A dead moment preserved in amber. A paralyzed universe. Shadows of our world can be captured in photographic images, but Gerhard Richter’s ongoing series, Overpainted Photographs exposes and rectifies precisely what these images try so hard to hide: their literal and figurative two-dimensionality.
The photos themselves, like so many others, probably remind you of those that you yourself have taken; family vacations, pets, places, pots and vases… flat machine-documented slices of space and time. Richter’s paint slapped and slopped across the surfaces of these pictures takes these mundane little windows into the lives and eyes of others, and morphs them into studies of the beautiful destruction of the true-to-sight world.
Beautiful for the way these small abstract paintings seem anything but random as they both negate and enhance the images they obscure, with Richter’s colors and textures often finding energy and poetry in the various scenes that the photos alone may have missed, as in the below Corvatsch. (If I did this HTML thing right there should be some text when you mouse-over pictures. Nope.)
Beautiful too for the way Richter’s overpainting reveals the hidden surface of photographs, like a fourth spatial dimension to the photograph’s attempt at a fully 3D scene. The paint also gives a sense of movement to the stillness of the images. Even the smallness of the works, standard 10 x 15 cm prints, contributes by lending a little sentiment-evoking fragility to each piece.
All in all, I think Gerhard Richter has produced some top-notch art here.
For more info see http://www.gerhard-richter.com/
– Alexa Lempel
Also if anyone figures out how to indent….
Very interesting combination of realism and the abstract. I particularly like the juxtaposition of the rich abstract patterns of paint laid over the photos of Florence. Especially given the rich history and importance of the city of Florence to the visual arts, that series seems to make more of a statement.
I would have never thought that painting over a photograph could make the image look better than the photograph alone since it is combining two contrasting forms of artwork. I just browsed through the photographs on the link and most all of the pieces look beautiful and look so much more full of life with the colors Richter has used. I really like what he has done.
You would think that splattering paint over an already beautiful picture would ruin the original photo. This is not the case here! All of these pictures are really cool. I love the way that painting over the original picture actually brings something new and interesting to the pictures.