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Staged in collaboration with the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the exhibition presents the work of Gerhard Richter, one of the best-known and most sought-after living painters, in dialogue with
works by seven international contemporary artists, who all share Richter’s profound
distrust of the image as a guarantee of truth.
Following on from Manipulating Reality, which explored the relationship between reality and representation in the medium
of photography, this exhibition focus on the disappearance of the image. Gerhard
Richter, one of the pioneers in depicting the dissolution of both the motif and
the medium, paints over original pictures or uses a blurred painting technique.
He deliberately selects trivial or random motifs as the starting point for his
paintings. Well aware of the power of images, Richter strives to break or at least
question their authority by making his pictures merge or disappear. He plays with
reality and appearance and converts figurative images into abstract ones by focusing,
for example, on fragmentary details. He pioneered the use of existing images as
the basis of his paintings, primarily as a means of transferring the characteristics
of one medium to another, and for placing different genres on an equal footing.
Through his entire body of work, Richter addresses the difference between subjective
perception and the objective experience of reality in which the artist can only
offer possible approaches to address the difficult relationship between object
and its representation.
The CCCS has invited seven contemporary artists who also use the dissolution
of the image to engage in a dialogue with Richter’s work. To maintain their own
artistic identity the works of each artist will be presented in its own space.
Xie Nanxing (China, 1970) uses video and photography as intermediate media for
his reflections on painting and the human condition; Lorenzo Banci (IT, 1974)
investigates the boundaries between representation and abstraction by painting
dissolving shapes in which mere light is the object; while Scott Short’s (USA,
1964) conceptual work is based on photocopying a blank sheet of paper hundreds
of times until incidental marks create an accidental image which then becomes
a painting. Roger Hiorns (UK, 1975), one of the four artists shortlisted for the
2009 Turner Prize, works with chemical components and choreographs planned incidents
to create his sculptural work. Marc Breslin (USA, 1983) uses the pictorial surface
like a palimpsest, scratching signs and graffiti into the many layers of paint,
thus creating a metaphor for mental processes, memory and oblivion. Wolfgang Tillmans
(DE, 1968) treats the photographic paper as canvas. He started by representing
everyday subjects and from there he went further into abstraction, following the
logic of the medium itself. Antony Gormley (UK, 1950) will produce a site-specific
installation for the exhibition, that further develops his research for a new
social art where the interplay between abstraction and figuration is the result
of a process of dissolution of the human figure.
Meanwhile Richter remains true to the medium of painting, yet questions its possibilities,
the other seven artists take as their theme the absence (and sometimes impossibility)
of making a clear statement by means of a picture today.
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