About the Work

Gerhard Richter applied monochrome gray paint to the reverse sides of a mirror. Instead of producing an image, Richter transforms the gray paint on glass into a ground for reflections. Viewers can see themselves and their surroundings mirrored on the dark surfaces, and one can interpret these monochromes as large-scale photographic plates of endless exposure. Blurring the boundary between painting and photography, the artist explores the complex relationship between abstraction and representation.

Although Richter is, in many respects, a very traditional painter, and revels in all the things paint can do – render images of reality, create luscious concoctions of colour – he also has a strong cerebral, radical element to his make-up. Although still concerned with looking through a rectangular, window-like frame – much as his figurative or abstract paintings – Richter’s panes of glass and mirrors, that he has continued to make from 1967 to today, have affinities with Conceptual Art, and even with Marcel Duchamp’s Dada works. This mirror, colored grey by the pigment attached to the back of the glass, resembles Richter’s earlier ‘black and white’, photographic paintings, since the reality one sees reflected in its surface is grey, but also his monochrome grey canvases of the early 1970s.

About the Artist

Gerhard Richter (born in Dresden in 1932) is a German painter known for his diverse painting styles and subjects. His deliberate lack of commitment to a single stylistic direction has often been read as an attack on the implicit ideologies embedded in the specific histories of painting. Such distaste for aesthetic dogma has been interpreted as a response to his early art training in communist East Germany. Relying on scenes from newspapers, personal photographs, and magazines, Richter painted the victims of serial killers, portraits of famous European intellectuals, and German terrorists (the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang), among other media images. He also created a series of colour-chart paintings, which were the inspiration for his 2007 large stained glass window for Cologne Cathedral. Richter later returned to stained glass design when in 2020 he produced three sets of windows, which recall his scraped oil paintings, for Tholey Abbey, Germany’s oldest monastery. Richter was the recipient of many awards, among them the Golden Lion for painting at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997) and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting (1997).