Gerhard Richter

Betty (1991) poses questions of identity and veracity in portraiture and printmaking. It is titled after Richter’s daughter, who is depicted here in a floral robe, her head turned away from the viewer. The image is layered in mimesis: it is offset-printed from a photograph of Richter’s iconic 1988 painting of the same name, which was itself painted from a photograph of the subject taken by the artist. Richter’s portrait speaks with the intimate visual language of a family photograph, yet its repeated technical mediations refute any affective connection with the anonymous subject.

In 1993, as a special project for the international journal Parkett, Richter produced Grün-Blau-Rot (Green-Blue-Red), a sequential series of unique small paintings following a basic chromatic principle. He applied the same three vivid oil-based pigments onto 115 uniformly sized canvases with a squeegee, employing the regimented process of his Abstraktes Bilder series, which allows for the relatively uncontrolled interaction of color. Made by the artist’s own hand without the restraining grid of the printing process, each work exists as a unique variation on the same theme.

Richter’s oeuvre continues to function as a creative springboard in his 2011 series of Strips. To create these large-scale inkjet prints, he digitally divided his oil-on-canvas Abstract Painting (724-4) (1990) into 4,096 vertical segments. Segments were then randomly selected and repeated until they lengthened out into thin horizontal strips of uniform color, allowing a single painting to spawn multiple new images. Clean and crisp, appearing as sort of horizontal barcodes, the Strips subvert their painterly origins with an air of modern detachment. Richter’s impulse to modify and reinterpret his own works resurfaces in Cage Grid (2011), a series of inkjet prints created by dividing a photograph of his 2006 oil painting Cage 6 into a four-by-four grid of squares.