Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs, Gagosian

For Gerhard Richter photography poses a problem. The photographic image is a flat, insubstantial thing, barely there, a shadow of reality with a perfectly featureless surface. Paintings, on the other hand, are meaty, textured things. Representational or abstract, they are objects in their own right. Richter has spent his entire career trying to reconcile these two mediums. He is famous, in fact, for his hyper real paintings of photographs, blurred as though seen through a camera lens or smudged with squeegees while the paint is still wet. For Richter, it seems, the material substance of paint is all-important.

An exhibition at Gagosian explores the German artist’s experiments with paint applied directly to the photographic surface. One series of photographs was taken in the run-up to his retrospective at Tate Modern in 2011. They capture the ebb and flow of visitors throughout the course of a single day, and are over-painted with marbled swirls of colours. White is used when there are just a few people in the galleries, and bolder colours indicate growing crowds. Through gaps in the paint we glimpse figures that we might have missed, or ignored – moments hidden in a sea people.

Richter is an iconic artist and the chance to see his work in the intimate environment of Gagosian is an opportunity not to be missed.