Gerhard Richter: reflecting windows

photo courtesy of dia beacon

Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cooke
The key mythemes grounding Western painting derive from the notion of a painting as either a window offering a view on to a world beyond or a mirror reflecting whatever is held before it. These two tropes, the window and the mirror, which metaphorically figure painting’s relation to visuality, now became his subjects.

Poised between architecture and painting, this seminal work invokes mythemes of glass, including the German Romantics’ reverence for it as a mystical substance, the German Expressionists’ fascination with it as the inculcation of a visionary new world, and salient modernist preoccupations with it, such as the embrace of transparency by Walter Gropius and his peers as integral to a utopian functionalist architecture.

Concurrently, in a series of paintings titled Fenster (Window), begun in 1967, Richter directly addressed abstraction, modernism’s primary pictorial language. Wittily and subtly reformulating the axiom that any representation is necessarily an abstraction, he simultaneously postulated the converse: abstraction is inherently referential. All languages of representation, the mimetic as well as the nonfigurative, are constructs whose formulations depend on the establishment of governing pictorial codes and conventions.

Subsuming spectators into that fluctuating matrix, depriving them of any clear, fixed, stable relationship to space and place, his mirrors seductively undermine the viewers’ authorial indepen-dence and autonomy by dissembling traditional hieratic perspectival systems of perception.