This article explores the connections that artist Gerhard Richter establishes between photography and painting throughout his artistic career, which began in the 1960s. Since then, Richter’s goal has been to construct images—both pictorial and photographic—whether blurred or sharp, geometric, abstract, or figurative. The world Richter paints is made up of banal situations, anonymous people, and familiar landscapes, which makes us feel comfortable as viewers, as if Richter were creating an archive of recognizable places and moments we can connect with through our own subjectivity.
The fact that many of the images are blurred shows us that he is not painting photographs, but rather constructing images from photography and through painting; yet what we see before us is neither one nor the other. The richness of his artistic proposal lies precisely in this intermediate space between photography and painting, between figuration and abstraction, between the subjective and the collective.
Richter creates an extensive and varied record of different types of images that are part of our everyday universe, and by being painted, they take on substance, gradually creating a simulated reality—a vast and aesthetic archive in which we can see ourselves reflected, questioned, and seduced. Gerhard Richter’s image archive invites us, in fact, to reflect on our relationship with the world and its representations.