Gerhard Richter Painting
April 17, 2012
The Art and Art History Department is offering two screenings of Gerhard Richter Painting. The documentary was released on March 14, 2012, and DePauw is the only location in Indiana to show the film.
The first screening will be Thursday, April 19 at 7:30 p.m. in the Peeler Art Center auditorium for the DePauw community only. Attendance will count as punch-card credit for art students, and a full house is expected. It will feature an opening talk by Art History Professor Michael Mackenzie.
The second screening on Saturday, April 21 at 6 p.m. is open to the public.
One of the world’s greatest living painters, German artist Gerhard Richter has spent more than half a century experimenting with a tremendous range of techniques and ideas, addressing historical crises and mass media representation alongside explorations of chance procedures. Infamously media-shy, he agreed to appear on camera for the first time in 15 years for a 2007 short by filmmaker Corinna Belz titled Gerhard Richter’s Window.
Her follow-up, Gerhard Richter Painting, is a documentary of Richter’s creative process, juxtaposed with intimate conversations with his critics, collaborators and American gallerist Marian Goodman, as well as rare archival material.
The documentary shows Richter creating a series of large-scale abstract canvases, using fat brushes and a massive squeegee to apply and then scrape off layer after layer of brightly colored paint. This mesmerizing footage of a highly charged process of creation and destruction turns Belz’s portrait of an artist into a work of art itself.