Film screening
Gerhard Richter: Painting

Wed, 22.01.2020
7:30 PM Warehouse421

Director: Corinna Belz
Documentary, Germany, 2011, 97 min.


The opening frames take us directly into the promised land – the artist's studio, his bright, clean, well-guarded workspace. A bustling production hall where Germany's preeminent post-war painter directs an army of assistants operating at peak capacity to satisfy the appetites of the global art market. On the contrary, we are given a fly-on-the-wall perspective to an intimate and highly personal artistic production process, as the coveted canvasses of one of the most productive and respected painters in contemporary art take shape. It is a quiet yet highly charged process of action and reflection, inner struggle and astonishing physical ease. The artist views a spontaneous first draft: “Hard to say. They could be better.” We are often treated to Gerhard Richter's pithy comments, which reveal not only hard-won insight into life and art, but also wry humor, great humanity, and refreshing authenticity.
 
At the cutting edge of his field for five decades now, Richter works beyond the boundaries of trends and cynicism. Born in 1932, his first thirteen years were spent under the National Socialist regime, then came sixteen years of East German Communism, followed by nearly half a century of what Richter refers to here in old archive footage as “Capitalist Realism”. He remains fundamentally skeptical of all belief systems and ideologies.
 
Filmmaker Corinna Belz uses the extraordinary access granted to her by the famously private artist to give us a rare, immediate insight into the genesis of a series of abstract paintings, from the first stroke of paint on canvas, through countless layers of overpainting, to the exhibition opening in New York.
 
“Gerhard Richter: Painting” is a penetrating portrait of the artist at work. But it is also a film about seeing. Inspired and challenged by the critical eye of the artist, we are reminded that visual art, defying linguistic barriers, can be one of the most precious and complex means of expression available to human beings.

About the series “Art Films at Warehouse 421”:
 
Film and visual arts are joined at the hip, and filmmakers have always been interested in the life and work of artists. Throughout the fall and winter the Goethe-Institutin cooperation with Warehouse 421 will be showing films about art and artists – real ones, fictional artists and art forgers. Be inspired.