Presentation of the Gerhard Richter Collection
February 1 to May 1, 2022
The Museum Ludwig is presenting a concentrated exhibition in honor of Gerhard Richter’s ninetieth birthday. From February 1 to May 1, 2022, the Museum Ludwig will be showing a selection of five works by Gerhard Richter (born February 9, 1932) from its collection. The exhibition will feature figurative works depicting people and objects as well as abstract paintings and works comprised of panes of glass and mirrors.
The Museum Ludwig in Cologne, which Gerhard Richter himself has jokingly referred to as his “hometown museum,” holds some of the artist’s most important works. His paintings Ema (Nude on a Staircase) from 1966 and Five Doors from 1967 were part of the original donation to the museum from the collectors Peter and Irene Ludwig in 1976. Additional donations and purchases followed, such as Richter’s monumental contribution to the Venice Biennale 48 Portraits from 1971–72, the painting War (Abstract No. 484) from 1981, and later 11 Panes of Glass from 2003 as well as Two Grey from 2016. The latest addition is Nine Objects, a portfolio of offset prints created in 1969, which the Perlensucher initiative from the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig acquired for the museum in 2021.
While Ema (Nude on a Staircase), the first color “photo painting” in Richter’s oeuvre, is a large-scale, blurred reproduction of a photograph of a private subject, Five Doors is part of his series Constructions. In these works, Richter uses regularly structured motifs such as bars, windows, or curtains to create illusions of spatiality that question the painting process as such as well as the viewer’s ideas about the picture. The formally reduced, everyday sequence of an opening door, which gradually reveals a view of an empty, indefinite space, shows Richter’s interest in playing with illusion and reality “behind” the picture as well as our expectations, their fulfillment, and also their undermining and disappointment. Along with the five-part painting, several accompanying drawings that were also added to the collection in 1976 will also be shown. Five Doors will be presented again for the first time after an extensive restoration (September 2018 – May 2019) funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Richter also circles around the question of images as illusions in his diffusely reflective objects, such as Two Grey and 11 Panes of Glass. The multifaceted sense of visual space that the artist creates with the means of painting is conjured here in the material itself, in the enamel coating on immaculately smooth float glass and the nebulous sense of depth of the reflection in specially coated glass panes positioned in successive layers.
The extent to which such disorienting elements that question our own perception and artistic illusionism run through Richter’s entire oeuvre is evident not least in Nine Objects from 1969, a group of offset prints based on photographs that the artist took of wooden objects that he built himself. The photographs, which were professionally retouched in an unsettling manner according to the artist’s directions, illustrate Richter’s examination of illusion and reality. As he notes: “Illusion—or better appearance—is my life’s theme.”