Projects and Events of the Department

GERHARD RICHTER 85

Department of Art Theory Symposium

08 December 2017, FUGA Budapest Center of Architecture

Participants:

Perhaps there is no other contemporary artist who is so beloved by the public as well as by the international professional art scene, aesthetes, philosophers and critics alike as the German painter, Gerhard Richter.

The 85-year-old painter moved from Dresden to West Germany in 1961, where he symbolically resumed his oeuvre, whose arc has been unbroken for the past five decades. Richter, also known as the 'chameleon', has a uniquely diverse oeuvre consisting of about 3000 works, from photo paintings to gray monochromes, from overpainted photographs to glass installations, from mirror paintings to digital abstracts. He spectacularly refuses to succumb to the pressure of having a homogeneous style. This continually renewing stylistic heterogeneity nevertheless forms a consistent arc, whose basic questions and objectives can be traced back to the early sixties. He examines the ontological relationships between photography and its subject, and between photography and painting, and how the boundaries between abstraction and figuration can be eliminated through new means. His “post-historical” paintings are in a dialectical relationship with Warhol and Baselitz's works, and they give a variety of answers as to how recent events can be reproduced through painting in the era of photography, film, and the Internet.

Teachers, lecturers, present and former students of the University of Fine Arts Art Theory Department set out to foster the Hungarian reception of his inescapable oeuvre.