Gerhard Richter’s Untitled (1.8.89) challenges our ability as viewers to absorb visual information. Atop an image of a church with soaring arches and passersby are vibrant, textured splashes of yellow, blue and orange. As such, the present work straddles abstraction and realism in its purest forms. Such a dichotomy is central to Richter’s combination of media, and rich interpretive meanings arise from the pairing of paint and photograph. This work is one of the very first of Richter’s overpainted photographs. Beginning in the same year, 1989, Richter began to employ a process which begins with taking otherwise wasted images—whether it be snapshots he rejected as image sources for paintings, or duplicates and blurry shots from personal albums. Printed in commercial 4 x 6-inch scale, the photograph is then dragged across wet paint left on the plastic squeegee used for one of his renowned Abstraktes Bilder. This unique combination of image and paint—the tools on which his painting process relies—produces a new artistic form that derives meaning from both of its sources.
These intimately-scaled works address some of the central questions of Richter’s artistic practice. When paint lies atop an accurate representation of reality, the meaning of the snapshot changes, with details obscured or altered. Siri Hustvedt describes this effect: “the artist’s strokes intensify my interest in what’s happening by reducing my frame of vision, but also by turning the action into part of an artwork, an alteration that is almost ludicrously profound.” The abstract forms of the paint, in turn, gain associative meaning as viewers project them into the settings of the original photograph—what might have been a context-less amorphous blob becomes a curtain, a wave, or a floating being.
