K20

Gerhard Richter has produced an extensive and complex oeuvre in recent decades. The K20 Kunstsammlung am Grabbeplatz now devotes a wide-ranging retrospective exhibition to this Dresden native and resident of Cologne, who was born in 1932. The project examines all crucial phases of Richter's career, and features, among others, paintings after photographs, Vermalungen, gray paintings, and abstractions. Rounding out the selection are recent and new works, including never previously exhibited landscapes and abstract compositions. On view as well will be a series of glass works, involving sheets of glass, reverse glass paintings, and mirrors, as well as sculptures consisting of several layered transparent panes or partially reflective elements. The most recent work in the exhibition is the painting "K20" of 2004, executed after a photograph, which recapitulates a section of the façade of the museum building on Grabbeplatz.

The exhibition revolves around Richter's central theme, namely the conditions, limits, and potentialities of painting, while asking: How deeply are painting and beholder mutually implicated? To what extent can Richter's pictures - and the panes of glass which find consistent application in his work - by interpreted as windows? According to traditional and ostensibly plausible conceptions, an image offer its beholder a section of the visible world. This proposition is perpetually called into question by Richter in his work, whether by characterizing his choice of subject as the product of chance, or by deliberately rendering the depicted subject indistinct via painterly procedures.

This comprehensive exhibition, comprising ca. 100 paintings and sculptures, was planned in close collaboration with the artist. The itinerary begins in the 2nd upper story, where works from all phases of Richter's career, including quite recent ones, are seen in immediate proximity to the permanent collection of the Kunstsammlung. The so-called "America Gallery" in the 1st upper story is devoted to a suite composed of outstanding examples of his powerfully chromatic abstract paintings, among them "Faust" 1980), a member of the group of creamy Vermalungen. Also featured is Richter's recently completed mural "Strontium" measuring more than 9 x 9 meters, which will leave Europe directly after the Düsseldorf exhibition to travel to its new home in San Francisco's new de Young Museum building. An additional highpoint is the cycle "Acht Grau" (Eight Gray, 2002), shown in the large gallery on the ground floor; the group was premiered in Berlin, and has since become a part of the Bilbao collection.

Richter's work was seen in the Rhineland in 1971 in the Düsseldorf Kunstverein for Rhineland and Westphalia; in 1986 in the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle; and finally in a large retrospective in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn in 1993/1994. A representative cross-section of his oeuvre was offered by an epochal survey organized in the USA in 2002/2003, and inaugurated in New York City's Museum of Modern Art. This project of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is the first synoptic showing since then of works by one of Europe's most decorated artists. In 2000, Gerhard Richter was awarded the Staatspreis of the federal state of Northrhine-Westphalia.

This exhibition, conceived and organized by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, contains works loaned by international public and private collections. After its stay in Düsseldorf, it will be on view from June to September 2005 in Munich's Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and adjoining Kunstbau. Finally, two Japanese venues are scheduled: the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, and the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Sakura.

The curator of the exhibition is Armin Zweite, with assistance from Anette Kruszynski.