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Lot Essay
The casts of the heads of two German artists, Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo, face each other, eyes closed. Are they linked in competition, in battle, or in a strange spiritual or psychic union? Executed in 1971, Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo was Richter's contribution to a collaborative exhibition project carried out with Palermo, who contributed the monochrome ochre surroundings. This exhibition took place at Heiner Friedrich's gallery in Cologne.
Both Palermo and Richter had come to West Germany from the Communist East, and the use of these plaster-casts, painted grey, to mimic public statuary was thus deeply loaded with political and historical resonance. Both in the Socialist Realist tradition in their native East, and in the Nazi past of Germany as a whole, sculptures of people had been used to commemorate the then great and good, people who were now often reviled or at best deliberately forgotten. These statues had been used as political tools, as a form of propaganda, and were now almost taboo. Yet for Richter, a self-proclaimed Capitalist Realist, this was a visual idiom ripe for appropriation, in part precisely because so many of his contemporaries were deliberately aiming for something that was explicitly distanced from Germany's political past. In Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, Richter leapt into the fray by going against the tide, deliberately mimicking public statuary in order to create a deliberately flippant and self-deprecating celebration of himself and Palermo.
Discussing Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, Richter explained that,
'It was a formal matter. Maybe it was a polemic against the Zeitgeist of egalitarianism, pluralism, and this while anti-aesthetic debate. Maybe because art was irrelevant. Maybe we made those heads and lauded the classical in order to be polemical, against the time' (Richter (2001), quoted in R. Storr, 'Interview with Gerhard Richter', pp. 287-309, exh. cat, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, Storr (ed.), New York 2002, p. 300).
This raises the important consideration that Richter's sculptural commemoration of himself and his collaborator was tongue-in-cheek, but in a serious manner. He is lampooning the cult of the individual, and yet is also questioning its removal from the considerations of some of his contemporaries within the artworld. While Richter was aware that he was not particularly deserving of a temple to himself, he was also hitting back at the reduction of the role of the individual. For what is art without an artist, without an individual? Richter's Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo are a complex vanguard action in the defence of the role of the artist. In this way, this work anticipates the reciprocal admiration that came to exist between Richter and his British contemporaries, Gilbert and George. Their mutual interests are reflected in similarities between their Living Sculpture works and Richter's Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, which both comment on the involvement of the artist as a work of art and the potential for a more European sense of Pop representation and self-representation.
But as with so much of Richter's art, this defence is by no means as simple as it may appear. For these sculptures, while appearing as a portrait and a self-portrait that assert some form of status and merit, are based on casts taken of the two artists' faces. These are therefore as arbitrary as a source or as subject matter as the snapshots that Richter has so often enshrined in oils. He has taken two givens, the two heads of the artists taking part in the exhibition, and has rendered them in plaster through a technique that takes on the appearance of art, of sculpture, but which is in fact almost mechanical in its simplicity. It is not a process of creativity or sculptural skill that resulted in these likenesses. In this way, Richter's apparent defence of art becomes a complex deconstruction of its processes. For what appears as a neo-classical tribute to two artists in fact consists of casts that were created almost by rote. Richter's defence of the artist is therefore a Trojan Horse, a work almost Minimalist and reductive in its simplicity, its content limited to the arbitrary appearances of the artists' own faces.
That Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo was a rather tuppenny-ha'penny version of public statuary is emphasised by the surface of each which is covered in grey paint-- these are not bronzes, but are masquerading. Nothing is as it seems. These brushstrokes have been applied with an express brutality, with an emphasis on their gestural nature, bringing attention to the fraudulent nature of these statues. In this way, they relate to some of Palermo's Fabric Pictures, which rather than involving paint instead used manufactured textiles, sewn together in order to imitate what appeared to be paintings with three bands of block colour. Like Palermo, Richter's paintings kept the process of artistic creation at one cynical remove, as is also the case in Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo. Ironically, the appearance of the brushstrokes is still visible in the two later bronze versions of the sculptures, one of which is in the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
By the time of their collaboration in Cologne in 1971, Palermo had begun to create entire environments as well as his Fabric Pictures. Palermo's ochre decoration fused and redefined the public space of the gallery in a manner that was at once ironic it was an artwork that could never be purchased yet was in a commercial gallery and yet that also harnessed a very real sense of ambience that played well with the sculptures in the centre and the air of reverence that these were meant to instil. This became a sort of chapel, a neo-Classical space in which an old form of art was resurrected and in which two artworld rebels placed themselves on a pedestal. This was a challenge to the public, but also the their contemporaries in the artworld: they had thrown down the gauntlet and demanded that people accept the unacceptable. With this in mind, Richter later reflected on a visit to Munich where he saw a recreation of the installation at Heiner Friedrich's gallery and also a work by Giulio Paolini: 'I suddenly understood how dead serious mine was. That it was somehow inconsistent with the humour of Pop art. If it was humorous, it was that way in a tragic manner' (Richter, quoted in ibid., p. 300). There is humour, but there is also a deep and neverending argument about the value of art and the value of the artist that plays out within this sculpture, within the relationship between these artists, between the boundaries of what they are and what they seem to be. In this way, Richter has managed to condense his own anxieties about the validity and liability of art and representation into a sculpture that itself, with the busts of two artists facing each other, represents just such a discussion.
Both Palermo and Richter had come to West Germany from the Communist East, and the use of these plaster-casts, painted grey, to mimic public statuary was thus deeply loaded with political and historical resonance. Both in the Socialist Realist tradition in their native East, and in the Nazi past of Germany as a whole, sculptures of people had been used to commemorate the then great and good, people who were now often reviled or at best deliberately forgotten. These statues had been used as political tools, as a form of propaganda, and were now almost taboo. Yet for Richter, a self-proclaimed Capitalist Realist, this was a visual idiom ripe for appropriation, in part precisely because so many of his contemporaries were deliberately aiming for something that was explicitly distanced from Germany's political past. In Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, Richter leapt into the fray by going against the tide, deliberately mimicking public statuary in order to create a deliberately flippant and self-deprecating celebration of himself and Palermo.
Discussing Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, Richter explained that,
'It was a formal matter. Maybe it was a polemic against the Zeitgeist of egalitarianism, pluralism, and this while anti-aesthetic debate. Maybe because art was irrelevant. Maybe we made those heads and lauded the classical in order to be polemical, against the time' (Richter (2001), quoted in R. Storr, 'Interview with Gerhard Richter', pp. 287-309, exh. cat, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, Storr (ed.), New York 2002, p. 300).
This raises the important consideration that Richter's sculptural commemoration of himself and his collaborator was tongue-in-cheek, but in a serious manner. He is lampooning the cult of the individual, and yet is also questioning its removal from the considerations of some of his contemporaries within the artworld. While Richter was aware that he was not particularly deserving of a temple to himself, he was also hitting back at the reduction of the role of the individual. For what is art without an artist, without an individual? Richter's Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo are a complex vanguard action in the defence of the role of the artist. In this way, this work anticipates the reciprocal admiration that came to exist between Richter and his British contemporaries, Gilbert and George. Their mutual interests are reflected in similarities between their Living Sculpture works and Richter's Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, which both comment on the involvement of the artist as a work of art and the potential for a more European sense of Pop representation and self-representation.
But as with so much of Richter's art, this defence is by no means as simple as it may appear. For these sculptures, while appearing as a portrait and a self-portrait that assert some form of status and merit, are based on casts taken of the two artists' faces. These are therefore as arbitrary as a source or as subject matter as the snapshots that Richter has so often enshrined in oils. He has taken two givens, the two heads of the artists taking part in the exhibition, and has rendered them in plaster through a technique that takes on the appearance of art, of sculpture, but which is in fact almost mechanical in its simplicity. It is not a process of creativity or sculptural skill that resulted in these likenesses. In this way, Richter's apparent defence of art becomes a complex deconstruction of its processes. For what appears as a neo-classical tribute to two artists in fact consists of casts that were created almost by rote. Richter's defence of the artist is therefore a Trojan Horse, a work almost Minimalist and reductive in its simplicity, its content limited to the arbitrary appearances of the artists' own faces.
That Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo was a rather tuppenny-ha'penny version of public statuary is emphasised by the surface of each which is covered in grey paint-- these are not bronzes, but are masquerading. Nothing is as it seems. These brushstrokes have been applied with an express brutality, with an emphasis on their gestural nature, bringing attention to the fraudulent nature of these statues. In this way, they relate to some of Palermo's Fabric Pictures, which rather than involving paint instead used manufactured textiles, sewn together in order to imitate what appeared to be paintings with three bands of block colour. Like Palermo, Richter's paintings kept the process of artistic creation at one cynical remove, as is also the case in Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo. Ironically, the appearance of the brushstrokes is still visible in the two later bronze versions of the sculptures, one of which is in the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
By the time of their collaboration in Cologne in 1971, Palermo had begun to create entire environments as well as his Fabric Pictures. Palermo's ochre decoration fused and redefined the public space of the gallery in a manner that was at once ironic it was an artwork that could never be purchased yet was in a commercial gallery and yet that also harnessed a very real sense of ambience that played well with the sculptures in the centre and the air of reverence that these were meant to instil. This became a sort of chapel, a neo-Classical space in which an old form of art was resurrected and in which two artworld rebels placed themselves on a pedestal. This was a challenge to the public, but also the their contemporaries in the artworld: they had thrown down the gauntlet and demanded that people accept the unacceptable. With this in mind, Richter later reflected on a visit to Munich where he saw a recreation of the installation at Heiner Friedrich's gallery and also a work by Giulio Paolini: 'I suddenly understood how dead serious mine was. That it was somehow inconsistent with the humour of Pop art. If it was humorous, it was that way in a tragic manner' (Richter, quoted in ibid., p. 300). There is humour, but there is also a deep and neverending argument about the value of art and the value of the artist that plays out within this sculpture, within the relationship between these artists, between the boundaries of what they are and what they seem to be. In this way, Richter has managed to condense his own anxieties about the validity and liability of art and representation into a sculpture that itself, with the busts of two artists facing each other, represents just such a discussion.