18. Juni 2009

While Gerhard Richter typically chose his images at random when making his Overpainted Photographs, 18. Juni 2009 is a treasured exception. Rather than the found snapshots and anonymous imagery that populate much of the series, Richter here turns the camera—and the brush—on himself, taking a photograph of himself with Marian Goodman walking through a gallery exhibition. The gesture is intimate and deliberate in equal measure. His careful intervention, dabbling paint across the left and right corners of the composition, reframes the image with quiet authority, obscuring extraneous participants in the tableau and drawing the eye inward, toward the two figures at its center. What remains is a portrait of a partnership: two people who, over nearly four decades, had together placed some of the most consequential works of contemporary art into the permanent collections of the world's greatest institutions. That Richter chose to memorialize this relationship within a series otherwise governed by chance is itself a statement. Some things, the work implies, are too important to leave to chance.

Richter made 18. Juni 2009 almost a quarter-century after he first partnered with Goodman, and the work carries the full weight of that history. Theirs had been one of the great gallerist-artist relationships of the era—a bond built on shared intellectual seriousness and mutual trust, sustained across more than a dozen solo exhibitions and a profound transformation in Richter's international standing. The paint he lays across the photograph does not obscure Goodman so much as consecrate her—folding her into the world of his making, acknowledging that she had long been part of it. His words about her, offered to the New Yorker around the same period, read now as the caption this work always deserved: "Marian is a presence. She is wise. She has courage." (G. Richter, quoted in P. Schjeldahl, "Dealership," The New Yorker, January 26, 2004, online [accessed: March 30, 2026].)