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拍品專文
With its glossy layer of white pigment spread horizontally and colliding with two vertical columns against a fast-diffusing ominous cloud of black, September immediately brings back one of the most terrible and iconic images consecrated to twenty-first century collective memory, the terror attack on New York’s World Trade Centre on September 11 2001. The totemic silvery pillars are immediately recognizable as the wounded Twin Towers, the catastrophic event frozen in the moment the second plane hit the South Tower, from which a dense cloud of black smoke rose and spread over the sky. Based on Gerhard Richter’s seminal 2005 painting of the same
name, September, 2009, (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), the present work is one of forty original prints. The original, painted from a newspaper photograph, portrays the moment the hijacked plane hit the tower. In the present work, Richter has taken this method of overpainting one step further by photographing his painting and reproducing the image as a digital print, effectively closing the circle on his longstanding exploration into the ability for art, in painting and photography, to effectively and truthfully represent reality. September tellingly embodies the process of mediated repetition and reproduction through which the world experienced the shock of 9/11. September in this sense inscribes itself in the artist’s engagement with politically charged themes and the way they are presented and re-presented by the media, as seen in his 1988 October 18, 1977 cycle of paintings exploring the events surrounding the Baader-Meinhof group, also created from newspaper photographs.
Undergoing multiple distortions before finding complete realization in September, the image hints at an attempt to distance the terrorist attack. However, by blurring its brutality and visceral physicality in a seemingly abstract rendition, Richter unveils the extent to which images of 9/11 have become a heavy presence in our consciousness, almost more real than the real event.
name, September, 2009, (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), the present work is one of forty original prints. The original, painted from a newspaper photograph, portrays the moment the hijacked plane hit the tower. In the present work, Richter has taken this method of overpainting one step further by photographing his painting and reproducing the image as a digital print, effectively closing the circle on his longstanding exploration into the ability for art, in painting and photography, to effectively and truthfully represent reality. September tellingly embodies the process of mediated repetition and reproduction through which the world experienced the shock of 9/11. September in this sense inscribes itself in the artist’s engagement with politically charged themes and the way they are presented and re-presented by the media, as seen in his 1988 October 18, 1977 cycle of paintings exploring the events surrounding the Baader-Meinhof group, also created from newspaper photographs.
Undergoing multiple distortions before finding complete realization in September, the image hints at an attempt to distance the terrorist attack. However, by blurring its brutality and visceral physicality in a seemingly abstract rendition, Richter unveils the extent to which images of 9/11 have become a heavy presence in our consciousness, almost more real than the real event.