Gerhard Richter-Schwestern 1967 The German artist Gerhard Richter is famous for the astounding hyper-realism of his photo-pictures (seeThe Reader), smudged interpretations of various masterpieces by the Old Masters (see Bathers) and a truly breath-taking versatility, however his greatest contribution to painting is probably his introduction of the blur in pictorial representation. After centuries of painters seeking to reproduce nature in ever starker clarity, Richter shifts the focus, blurs the outlines and forces us to question our perceptions. Richter achieves the effect by a typically torturous route; using photographs (the invention ofphotography, lest we forget, was the single greatest contributing factor in the creation of all the various schools of modernism) which he then paints an exact reproduction of and then proceeds to accentuate any blurringpresent in the original.
1967’s Schwestern (Sisters) is a fine example of the technique (it also recently sold at Sotheby’s London for over…
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