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Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Gerhard Richter: Survey Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. Gerhard Richter: Surveyby John McGee  Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1991
(III/V), offset print, 97x66cm Gerhard Richter’s accessible yet enigmatic work has made him so famous that Wine Spectator magazine recently compared the vintage 2000 Bordeaux to the German artist, calling both contemporary classics. One of the most important, and highest-priced, living painters, Richter is a virtuoso who both renders blurry reproductions of black-and-white photos and squeegees bile-green abstractions across canvases. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter endured the Nazis and the communists. He trained to be a stage and commercial painter, then fled to West Berlin in 1961, just months before the wall went up. In 1962, he made his first photo-based painting, of a table in a magazine advertisement. This somewhat odd mini-retrospective sponsored by the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Stuttgart (ifa) looks at the four decades since then. The 27 photographs, prints and paintings Richter selected from ifa’s collection outline the artist’s range, from German politics to soft-focus nudes to paint-smeared paper. It’s like visiting the home of a dedicated, if only moderately wealthy, Richter collector. There are a couple of dazzling paintings, but much of the work is small or reproduced as prints. 
Gerhard Richter, Black, Red, Gold, The abstract paintings on the first of Tokyo Wonder Site’s three floors show two different sides of Richter’s love of the materiality and effects of paint. On one end is the cold illusion of brushed aluminum in the gray and white Abstract Painting (1990). On the other are Ophelia and Guildenstern (both 1998), diamond-shaped photographs of boiling paint swirls. Politics and history rule much of the second floor. In Black, Red, Gold (1990), Richter rotates the colors of the German flag 90 degrees counterclockwise, forming the vertical stripes of an early Brice Marden. Uncle Rudi, a 2000 photo of a 1965 black-and-white painting of the same title, shows Richter’s smiling uncle wearing his Nazi uniform in a WWII-era photo. The exhibition’s title comes from Survey, a 1998 print that compresses thousands of years of Western cultural history into a timeline of names of artists, architects, writers, and musicians. PR posters around town that show Richter’s well-loved Betty painting are a bit misleading. It and a number of other works (like Uncle Rudi) are presented here as photographs or prints. In recent years, Richter has re-appropriated some of his earlier photo-based paintings by photographing them, in a sense seeing what happens when they are returned to their origins. But it feels like a conceptual exercise (or gallerist’s scheme) and may leave visitors disappointed. Actually, the original Betty, and many of Richter’s best works, are currently touring America in the New York Museum of Modern Art-organized retrospective, “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting.” 
Gerhard Richter, Guildenstern, 1998 But Tokyo Wonder Site is a city-run cultural space, not a powerful museum. And some Richter is generally better than none. This is the first exhibition of its kind at Wonder Site, a former company-training center that the Tokyo municipal government renovated and opened in December 2001. Wonder Site programmers saw the ifa show as an opportunity to educate and inspire young Japanese artists with some of what’s best in contemporary art. While there are a number of nice pieces and the show does introduce Richter’s breadth, it fails to express the power of his larger canvases or delve deep into his recurring themes. It’s like being allowed to sniff a fine claret, but not drink it. _______________________________________This exhibition was held Apr-May 2003 at Tokyo Wonder Site in Suidobashi, Tokyo, Japan. ©2006 John McGee |
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