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Lot Essay
From a haze of semi-distinguishable forms emerge the features of Gilbert and George, the celebrated London-based artists. Indeed, George's features emerge twice for, by rotating the canvas ninety degrees anti-clockwise, it can be seen that the largest head of all has been placed at the 'bottom' of the canvas (when it is shown righted). Painted in 1975, Gilbert & George is a deliberately ambiguous work, making it all the more suited to the ambiguous artists that it depicts.
When Richter painted this work in 1975, he had been established to some degree on the art scene for some time and had since 1971 been a professor at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. He had also been widely exhibited. But this was as nothing compared to the splash that Gilbert and George made from the moment of their graduation in 1969. Dressed in their impeccable suits, and often with manners to match, they had become living sculptures, many of their works involving the documentation of the acts in which these 'sculptures' indulged. 'Gilbert and George have a wide range of sculptures for you,' they had declared in 1969. 'Singing sculpture, interview sculpture, dancing sculpture, meal sculpture, walking sculpture, nerve sculpture, café sculpture, and philosophy sculpture.' They placed themselves at the centre of a world of all-encompassing, life-engrossing performance and existence. All that they did was art, and at the same time they famously advocated, 'Art for All.'
While there are many differences between Richter's art and that of Gilbert & George, there were certain similarities and resonances. Richter's landscapes, for example, had met with the approval of the British artists, who themselves had created series of works in which they were shown immersed in distinctly aesthetic landscape settings. Some of these featured captions, occasionally slogan-like, underneath, for instance: 'Forever we will search and give our thought to the picture we have in our mind,' or 'Nothing can touch us or take us out of ourselves. It is a sculpture.' During the 1970s, these artists were almost revolutionary in advocating aesthetics, which had come to be considered as reactionary to some degree, and therefore something against which to struggle. But Richter and Gilbert and George alike were willing to swim against the tide, and to do so in a way that appeared to out-revolution the revolution. Richter's landscapes in particular involve a highly ambiguous, unresolved, and therefore all the more engaging combination of genuine aesthetics, irony and, in the use of photographic sources, both democracy and a cynicism towards received notions of beauty. Gilbert and George's aesthetic had also been echoed and acknowledged by Richter in the early 1970s in both his Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo and 48 Portraits, which used a similar classical visual language-- partly aping pompous civic statuary-- to react against the prevailing anti-authoritarianism evident in so much of the gestural and political art of the time.
Gilbert & George almost certainly came into direct contact with Richter for the first time when their exhibition Human Bondage was shown at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Dusseldorf in 1974. It was also through Fischer that Richter was able to paint a small group of works showing them, including Gilbert & George. Some of the images show Gilbert and George together, a few show them separately, but all of them feature similar distortions to those shown in the present lot. These resemble double-exposures-- or, in the case of Gilbert & George, treble-exposures. And this use of photographic distortion was another interest that these artists shared. A glance through Richter's compilation of many of his source images, Atlas, shows several multiple-exposure images, often with the artist's own features superimposed again and again. Meanwhile, in Dark Shadow, executed the year that they were exhibiting in Fischer's gallery, Gilbert and George portrayed their features superimposed, the one over the other's. Intriguingly, within Richter's paintings, it appears to have been exclusively in his depictions of Gilbert and George that he transferred this interest from photography into oils.
This crossover reflects an interest in ambiguity in both parties, and Richter's Gilbert & George deliberately exploits this. For are we looking at a painting that takes as its source an image of Gilbert and George the artists, Gilbert and George the sculptures, or indeed a photomontage created by Gilbert and George themselves? Has Richter appropriated one of their own images, or used his own photographs to create this portrait? The viewer, simply looking at Gilbert & George, is unable to tell, and this uncertainty is deliberately explored by Richter. Even considering the fact that he did in fact take the source photographs, Gilbert & George can be seen to augment, albeit in an indirect fashion, the oeuvre of those 'living sculptures,' documenting them as it does. It is all the more intriguing to note, with this in mind, that Richter has painted remarkably few of his fellow contemporary artists. Does the above ambiguity amount to a get-out clause?...
The process with which Richter paints his photography-based works was itself a form of precursor to the 'Art for All' of Gilbert and George (while his Leben mit Pop, eine Demonstration fur den Kapitalistichen Realismus, held with Konrad Lueg in a furniture shop in 1963, in some ways prefigured, albeit more briefly, the 'living sculpture' concept). The very process of taking a photograph, such a humble object often with humble contents, and raising it to the status of an oil painting, immortalising it in a medium associated with 'High Art,' is the apotheosis of the everyday. In laboriously rendering these photographs in oils, Richter shows his own commitment to this process: "I wasn't able simply to declare a photograph to be a work of art by saying it out loud. That wouldn't even have been a ready-made" (Richter, quoted in T. Neff (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Paintings', exh. cat., London, 1988, p. 47). At the same time, the magnanimity of the technique adds another level of democratising, as each photo that Richter transfers into oils becomes somehow equal the one with the other. A painting after a photograph of a Titian shown next to a holiday snap shown next to a blown-up image of paint swirls shown next to a newspaper image of a Nazi or a terrorist... Somehow, through Richter's eyes, through his analytical process of painting and through the distance that he takes from any original motif, Richter imposes the ultimate democratising conversion upon his subjects, which themselves are almost moot. In one way, this is the ultimate realism, the ultimate painting-from-life, as Richter reproduces the photograph before him, regardless of whether the world shown within that photo is his own, or is someone else's. As he wrote in an exhibition catalogue the same year that Gilbert & George was painted:
"No one painting is meant to be more beautiful than, or even different from, any other. Nor is it meant to be like any other, but the same: the same, though each was painted individually and by itself, not all together and all of a piece... I intended them to look the same but not be the same, and I intended this to be visible" (Richter in 1975, quoted in H.-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, trans. David Britt, London 1995, p. 84).
This same levelling has been used within Richter's Gilbert & George, which manages to be cold and distant, ambiguous, democratic, penetrating, personal and, in this paradoxical mixture of properties, thoroughly apt as a means of capturing so many aspects of the essence, both personal and artistic, of the London-based artists. All is art, and art for all, all in one-- Gilbert & George captures the core of the British and the German artists alike.
When Richter painted this work in 1975, he had been established to some degree on the art scene for some time and had since 1971 been a professor at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. He had also been widely exhibited. But this was as nothing compared to the splash that Gilbert and George made from the moment of their graduation in 1969. Dressed in their impeccable suits, and often with manners to match, they had become living sculptures, many of their works involving the documentation of the acts in which these 'sculptures' indulged. 'Gilbert and George have a wide range of sculptures for you,' they had declared in 1969. 'Singing sculpture, interview sculpture, dancing sculpture, meal sculpture, walking sculpture, nerve sculpture, café sculpture, and philosophy sculpture.' They placed themselves at the centre of a world of all-encompassing, life-engrossing performance and existence. All that they did was art, and at the same time they famously advocated, 'Art for All.'
While there are many differences between Richter's art and that of Gilbert & George, there were certain similarities and resonances. Richter's landscapes, for example, had met with the approval of the British artists, who themselves had created series of works in which they were shown immersed in distinctly aesthetic landscape settings. Some of these featured captions, occasionally slogan-like, underneath, for instance: 'Forever we will search and give our thought to the picture we have in our mind,' or 'Nothing can touch us or take us out of ourselves. It is a sculpture.' During the 1970s, these artists were almost revolutionary in advocating aesthetics, which had come to be considered as reactionary to some degree, and therefore something against which to struggle. But Richter and Gilbert and George alike were willing to swim against the tide, and to do so in a way that appeared to out-revolution the revolution. Richter's landscapes in particular involve a highly ambiguous, unresolved, and therefore all the more engaging combination of genuine aesthetics, irony and, in the use of photographic sources, both democracy and a cynicism towards received notions of beauty. Gilbert and George's aesthetic had also been echoed and acknowledged by Richter in the early 1970s in both his Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo and 48 Portraits, which used a similar classical visual language-- partly aping pompous civic statuary-- to react against the prevailing anti-authoritarianism evident in so much of the gestural and political art of the time.
Gilbert & George almost certainly came into direct contact with Richter for the first time when their exhibition Human Bondage was shown at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Dusseldorf in 1974. It was also through Fischer that Richter was able to paint a small group of works showing them, including Gilbert & George. Some of the images show Gilbert and George together, a few show them separately, but all of them feature similar distortions to those shown in the present lot. These resemble double-exposures-- or, in the case of Gilbert & George, treble-exposures. And this use of photographic distortion was another interest that these artists shared. A glance through Richter's compilation of many of his source images, Atlas, shows several multiple-exposure images, often with the artist's own features superimposed again and again. Meanwhile, in Dark Shadow, executed the year that they were exhibiting in Fischer's gallery, Gilbert and George portrayed their features superimposed, the one over the other's. Intriguingly, within Richter's paintings, it appears to have been exclusively in his depictions of Gilbert and George that he transferred this interest from photography into oils.
This crossover reflects an interest in ambiguity in both parties, and Richter's Gilbert & George deliberately exploits this. For are we looking at a painting that takes as its source an image of Gilbert and George the artists, Gilbert and George the sculptures, or indeed a photomontage created by Gilbert and George themselves? Has Richter appropriated one of their own images, or used his own photographs to create this portrait? The viewer, simply looking at Gilbert & George, is unable to tell, and this uncertainty is deliberately explored by Richter. Even considering the fact that he did in fact take the source photographs, Gilbert & George can be seen to augment, albeit in an indirect fashion, the oeuvre of those 'living sculptures,' documenting them as it does. It is all the more intriguing to note, with this in mind, that Richter has painted remarkably few of his fellow contemporary artists. Does the above ambiguity amount to a get-out clause?...
The process with which Richter paints his photography-based works was itself a form of precursor to the 'Art for All' of Gilbert and George (while his Leben mit Pop, eine Demonstration fur den Kapitalistichen Realismus, held with Konrad Lueg in a furniture shop in 1963, in some ways prefigured, albeit more briefly, the 'living sculpture' concept). The very process of taking a photograph, such a humble object often with humble contents, and raising it to the status of an oil painting, immortalising it in a medium associated with 'High Art,' is the apotheosis of the everyday. In laboriously rendering these photographs in oils, Richter shows his own commitment to this process: "I wasn't able simply to declare a photograph to be a work of art by saying it out loud. That wouldn't even have been a ready-made" (Richter, quoted in T. Neff (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Paintings', exh. cat., London, 1988, p. 47). At the same time, the magnanimity of the technique adds another level of democratising, as each photo that Richter transfers into oils becomes somehow equal the one with the other. A painting after a photograph of a Titian shown next to a holiday snap shown next to a blown-up image of paint swirls shown next to a newspaper image of a Nazi or a terrorist... Somehow, through Richter's eyes, through his analytical process of painting and through the distance that he takes from any original motif, Richter imposes the ultimate democratising conversion upon his subjects, which themselves are almost moot. In one way, this is the ultimate realism, the ultimate painting-from-life, as Richter reproduces the photograph before him, regardless of whether the world shown within that photo is his own, or is someone else's. As he wrote in an exhibition catalogue the same year that Gilbert & George was painted:
"No one painting is meant to be more beautiful than, or even different from, any other. Nor is it meant to be like any other, but the same: the same, though each was painted individually and by itself, not all together and all of a piece... I intended them to look the same but not be the same, and I intended this to be visible" (Richter in 1975, quoted in H.-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, trans. David Britt, London 1995, p. 84).
This same levelling has been used within Richter's Gilbert & George, which manages to be cold and distant, ambiguous, democratic, penetrating, personal and, in this paradoxical mixture of properties, thoroughly apt as a means of capturing so many aspects of the essence, both personal and artistic, of the London-based artists. All is art, and art for all, all in one-- Gilbert & George captures the core of the British and the German artists alike.