▎ Jacky Lau

In Capturing the Moment Exhibition by the Tate Modern and the YAGEO Foundation, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Gerhard Richter has four paintings presented and is undoubtedly an artist best representing how photography plays its role in the painting world. He painted these four works ‘photoly’ realistic, which surely will make visitors assume him being a realist painter. However, my first encounter with his works in my school days was surprisingly different: completely abstract expressions imbued with vivid colors and gestural moves! Let’s look at this most famous artist nicknamed ‘Picasso of 21st-century’.

Gerhard Richter, born in 1932, 92 years old, is one of the few living German artists who had his formative years in East Germany. He served in Hitler Youth Programme at the age of 10 and after WWII he was admitted to study in Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, East Germany and received highly realist painting education. By then his realist wall painting was very well received and socialist realism was very prevalent. He and his wife fled to West Germany just before the Berlin Wall was built. They settled in Düsseldorf where he met Joseph Beuys and later saw works of Jackson Pollock. Amazed by the conceptual ideas of Fluxus and the gestural expressive painting method, he embarked on a journey of blurred photo-realism, making all subjects unimportant/important at the same time. This artistic touch on his realist techniques embedded with his personal experiences during Nazi period and the postwar East Germany came with great success. He found his own artistic language, but what impressed me most is his continuous pursuit and questions on art representation.

He experimented with photographic images. In the 90s, he started abstract paintings. From figures of emotive, memory-like, subdued, poetic tone to energetic, colorful, instantaneous abstraction and later detached, geometric, pure colored lines and forms, Gerhard Richter presented to the art world an insatiable desire to create!

Some people see artworks as objects of beauty, but since I studied art and know how hard to create, I see artworks as fragments of life, behind which devoted persons experienced seemingly great ideas to feel exalted and also moments of void, incapable to go on! Roger Federer once said talent is important but discipline is also talent and we need both talents to achieve truly high. Gerhard Richter proved gifted at young age but most remarkably, he has been creating a breath of artworks which I call a legacy! I highly recommend art lovers to know him more. Don’t miss the exhibition in the Kaohsiung Museum! Capture the moment!

PS: the nickname thing is just to attract you guys attention but I don’t like the idea to compare artists’ achievements. They are all unique:-)