Panorama

Iceberg in Mist, Eisberg im Nebel
1982. 70 cm x 100 cm. Oil on canvas

Gerhard Richter: Panorama
Covering nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern  is a major retrospective exhibition that brings together together significant works from his remarkable career. An amazing colletion of  work including a couple of my favourite glass sculptural pieces.

The works together give a rich insight into the diversity of Richter’s practice and why his ideas and techniques have been so influential on painters over the past half-century. The challenge of photography as a means of image making informs many of the works, and  more obliquely his formative experiences of two totalitarian states.

His works do not attempt to describe the world around us though often they reflect it, but rather to explore the technologies of this representation and the ways in which they inflect our perception. In his exploration of these technologies painting remains a pre-eminent tool. As such, probably no other artist has done more to sustain the relevance and immediacy of painting as a mdium over the past fifty years.