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GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932) TROISDORF (572-2) signed, titled and dated "572-2 Troisdorf Gerhard Ric...

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GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932) TROISDORF (572-2) signed, titled and dated 572-2 Troisdorf Gerhard Ric...
GERHARD RICHTER
(b. 1932)
TROISDORF (572-2)
signed, titled and dated
"572-2 Troisdorf Gerhard Richter 1985" on the reverse
oil on canvas
33 1/2 x47 1/4 in. (85 x 120 cm)
painted in 1985 <p>PROVENANCE
Robert Pincus-Witten, NEW YORK <p>EXHIBITED
NEW YORK, Sperone Westwater Gallery and Marian Goodman Gallery, GERHARD RICHTER: ABSTRACT PAINTING AND LANDSCAPES, 1985, n.p. (illustrated)
DÜSSELDORF, Städtische Kunsthalle; Nationalgalerie Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz; Kunsthalle Bern and VIENNA, Museum moderner Kunst/Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, GERHARD RICHTER PAINTINGS 1962-1985, January 18-September 21, 1986, p. 319, pl. 572-2 (illustrated) <p>LITERATURE
B.H.D. Buchloh, P. Gidal, B. Pelzer and A. Thill, GERHARD RICHTER: CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ, BONN, 1993, Vol.III, no. 572-2 (illustrated)
Gerhard Richter's landscapes occupy a significant position within his oeuvre; no other genre has fascinated him to the same extent, nor has consumed his devotion with such intensity. The complex truth of Gerhard Richter's TROISDORF, 1985, and of his landscapes of these years more generally, is that they are completely "untruthful," as the artist qualifies them - indeed, at every level, disconcerting and equivocal, entrapping and seductive. Richter's famously soft-focus photographic landscapes are not this at all, of course, but paintings. "They are made to state their untruthfulness, unmask their dream, and reiterate their artificial construction" (R. Nasgaard, GERHARD RICHTER: PAINTINGS, NEW YORK, 1988, p. 52). Richter's landscapes are created, first by projecting the photographic image onto a white primed canvas; next, by roughly marking out the image in pencil; and only then - in what is a minutely labor-intensive process - by filling in the contours of the image with oil paint. Nonetheless, these landscapes share precious little with the sharp-focus images we associate with photo-realism; and even less do these evanescent images share the paradigmatic instantaneity of photography itself. Perpetually vacillating between photography's singular capacity to capture the world, as it appears to be, and the painter's absolute discretion completely to transfigure it, these landscapes blur nature's edges, just as surely as they do differences between media.
In a 1968 diary entry, Richter confesses that "my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, seemingly romantic and classical like lost paradises - above all they are 'deceptive'...they refer to the way we view nature transfigured. Nature, which in all its forms in constantly against us, because it has no meaning in mercy, no sympathy, because it knows nothing...because it is the absolute opposite [of] us, absolutely inhuman." (J. Lloyd, GERHARD RICHTER: THE LONDON PAINTINGS, London, 1988, unpaginated). Richter's TROISDORF is exemplary of the very best the classical landscape tradition has to offer in the compositional balance of its near and far ground, as well as in the infinitely subtle play of its distribution of light, which pervades the work of Jean Baptist Camille-Corot, the nineteenth century master. Yet it is the haunting melancholy of TROISDORF that makes it so very unlike Corot's, but so uniquely a part of Richter's singular vision. As Richter states, "Each aspect of beauty we see in nature, every enchanting colour, the peacefulness or energy of mood, gentle lineation, lofty space...is our own projection" (J. Lloyd, ibid, unpaginated).
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