Floor 4: Gerhard Richter: Southwest entrance from Lichtenstein
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Objects in This Gallery
9 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Wall Text
2002
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2003
This is one of many paintings Richter has created that feature windows and shadows. In these works, he engages with the Renaissance idea of painting as a window onto the world through which we observe a believable rendering of three-dimensional reality. Richter’s window paintings both continue and disrupt this tradition: The space this window suggests is extremely shallow and reveals nothing but a blank wall.
Wall Text
1974/1984
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
This is one of many color-chart paintings Richter created in the early 1970s using chance as a compositional tool. In these works, multiples of four (the number of primary colors, plus gray) are the basis for configurations that range from grids of four colors to charts containing 4,096 hues. The placement of the colors within the grid was determined randomly, by assigning each color a number and drawing the numbers from a box. Richter has said of this approach, “I found it interesting to tie chance to a wholly rigid order.”
Wall Text
1998
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
Wall Text
1971
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1993
This is one of many portraits that Richter created of Brigid Berlin (also known as Brigid Polk), an American artist who frequently collaborated with Andy Warhol. She carried a Polaroid camera and would capture herself throughout her day. Richter based this composition on a Polaroid taken during Polk’s visit to Germany in 1970. He painted it with the slight blur and muted tones of the original, achieving the immediacy and intimacy of a snapshot in paint. As he explained in 1972, “I’m not trying to emulate a photograph, I want to produce one.”
Wall Text
1965
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1988
Richter used photographs as sources for his paintings so as to minimize self-expression and compositional decisions. His sources ranged from newspaper and magazine clippings to family photos and personal snapshots. Portrait Müller is based on a portrait of Hans-Jürgen Müller, a Stuttgart art dealer, while Gymastics shows Karin Janz, a renowned East German gymnast, mid-leap. The blurred effect—created by dragging a dry brush over wet pigment—removes the artist’s hand from the paintings, making the surfaces, in his words, “technological, smooth and perfect.” The blurring also gives the pictures a sense of uncertainty, nostalgia, or loss.
Wall Text
1967
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1989
Richter used photographs as sources for his paintings so as to minimize self-expression and compositional decisions. His sources ranged from newspaper and magazine clippings to family photos and personal snapshots. Portrait Müller is based on a portrait of Hans-Jürgen Müller, a Stuttgart art dealer, while Gymastics shows Karin Janz, a renowned East German gymnast, mid-leap. The blurred effect—created by dragging a dry brush over wet pigment—removes the artist’s hand from the paintings, making the surfaces, in his words, “technological, smooth and perfect.” The blurring also gives the pictures a sense of uncertainty, nostalgia, or loss.
Wall Text
1990
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
_Wald (4) _is one of a group of abstract paintings that Richter painted in 1990. He only perceived a connection to the landscape upon their completion. Richter later explained, “There seemed to me a romantic mood in these four paintings that reminded me of a forest. In the blue, there is the sensation of a diffuse light, which is why I came upon the title. I applied the paint across the canvas in two separate movements; across the middle one can see a caesura.”
Wall Text
1990
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
Richter built up abstractions such as this and nearby _Wald (4) _slowly over time, layer by layer. Using a process he began to develop in the 1980s, he applied a coat of paint, then dragged a custom-made squeegee horizontally or vertically across the surface, smearing layers of still-wet pigment or scraping parts away to reveal sections beneath. This technique resulted in luscious patterns of color and texture, and also limited his control, allowing a role for chance. “I don’t have a specific picture in my mind’s eye,” Richter once explained. “I want to end up with a picture that I haven’t planned.”