Saturday 10 March 2012

On Gerhard Richter's 'Atlas' (posted on 11/3/12)

Gerhard Richter's 'Atlas', Sheet No 3. Print screen.



















In ancient Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan whose duty was to hold in his arms the sky -in contemporary terms one could translate the word 'sky' as 'the universe'- and thus, preventing it by falling on earth. However, as Buchloh observes in his essay 'The Anomic Archive', ''...in the 19th century, the term was increasingly deployed in German to identify any tabular display of systematized knowledge (image.1), so that one could have encountered an atlas in almost all fields of empirical science...''.

Gerhard Richter (b.1932) is a world acclaimed German visual artist whose work has helped re-define contemporary painting. In 1962 he begun working on a personal project, called 'Atlas', exhibited for the first time in public in 1972, at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, in Utrecht (image.4). Its synthesis begun with everyday life photographs (sometimes found, sometimes the artist's work) that Richter was collecting as well as donated by friends. Post cards, images extracted by newspapers, pornographic ones as well as historical images such us ''... shots of emaciated concentration-camp inmates...''.

Since its 1st exhibition, Richter's 'Atlas' has been exhibited several times, in different places of the world including 5.000 fragments as well as changes and re-arrangements of its content ''... as an organism that continues to evolve and change''[3], depicting aspects of his personal life, memories and experiences as well as sketches, studies or the artist's various states of being. For instance, when Gerhard Richter was working on the Titian's Annunciation, he did not included in his 'Atlas' the photographic sources and studies that he did on it, while being on Venice, but he included the photographs he took during his stay there, as a tourist.

The whole 'Atlas' is characterized by such configurations and relations between Richter's body of work (public) and its backstage cosmos (private). On that basis, the 'Atlas' is the artist's world, and as much complex and discursive as it appears to be, it is organized into a system (image.3a.b) -that doesn't necessarily follows an order in terms of chronology, but that of content and form- that allows the viewer to observe fragments and through which, to perceive the artist's personality and psychic processes. It is a synthesis, transformed progressively -and conceptually- by fragments into an identity; his identity, as much complex and discursive as a man's identity can possibly be.

In December 2003, 'Atlas' was exhibited for the 1st time in the United Kingdom, at White Chapel gallery, London. The press release, published on the occasion of the exhibition, noted amongst others that the ''... 'Atlas' maps the ideas, processes, life and times of one of the most important painters of the late 20th Century.''

'Atlas of the world'. Print screen.
Hanging plan of the 'Atlas', Gerhard Richter. Taken by the book 'Gerhard Richter: Atlas' (1997)















(detail) Diagram of the 'Atlas', Gerhard Richter. Taken by the book 'Gerhard Richter: Atlas' (1997)

















Gerhard Richter's 'Atlas'(1972), exhibition catalogue. Print screen.



Gerhard Richter's 'Atlas', installation view, Stadtische im Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1989. Photocopy.










































Nikos Georgopoulos,
London,
March 2012

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