Gerhard Richter Portraits /anglais - Tapa dura

Now that we do not have priests and philosophers anymore, artists are the most important people in the world ... Art is wretched, cynical, stupid, helpless, confusing.

This first comprehensive overview of the place of the portrait in Gerhard Richter s oeuvre assembles portrait paintings, photographs, watercolors, drawings and prints from the 1960s to the present--everything from classics like the strikingly honey-haired Betty to previously unknown works discovered in the course of research for this project. Icons such as Ema (Nude on a Staircase), Uncle Rudi, Mister Heyde, 48 Portraits, Self-Portrait, Family at the Sea, Small Bathers, Reader and Moritz, settle once and for all that Richter s emotional pull towards his material ( The subject matter is so important to me that I invest much time and effort in my search for it, so much that I just have to paint it. ) not only doesn t hinder him from producing classics, but rather encourages it. Stefan Gronert s essay follows the development of the portrait in the artist s work, starting with the blurred black-and-white pictures of the 1960s and moving on to the colorful panels of recent years, while Hubertus Butin devotes his essay to Richter s portrait photography of the 1960s. Portraits demonstrates that Richter pursues the theme of the portrait in not only all of the media in which he works, but in every genre as well.