A Small Graphic Inspired by Two Painters
During the pandemic in 2020, I spent much of my time in self-isolation. Two days before Christmas, I ventured out to see the Gerhard Richter exhibition in Vienna. Richter had impressed me for years, but until then I had never seen his original works. The exhibition was Gerhard Richter: Landschaft at the Kunstforum Wien.[1]
I often leave an exhibition full of impressions, and sometimes I try to work through one of them in a graphic of my own. This time, the starting point was a rather modest-looking print: Richter’s Wolke (Cloud) from 1971.[2]
A cloud that invites a second look
At first glance, it is a simple, atmospheric image of sea and sky. The pale cloud seems to hang alone above the dark water. Looking again, I found its relationship to the sea increasingly strange. The scene appeared convincing before I began to question how it could fit together.
A graphic response
I had also been drawn for some time to Hideaki Yamanobe’s monotypes.[3] For this small graphic, I brought an idea from those works together with the unease I found in Richter’s cloud.
My cloud is yellow with bright morning light, and I imagined its gentle reflection in the mist below. A pale space separates the yellow upper area from the darker forms, while grey-green washes gather towards the bottom of the sheet.
I wanted the image to suggest an idyllic landscape at first. Yet the height of the sun, the mist and the reflection do not quite add up in the way I would expect from an observed scene. That uncertainty was part of the intention: something quiet enough to enter easily, but less settled when looked at for longer.
Footnotes
[1] See the exhibition record for Gerhard Richter: Landschaft at Kunstforum Wien, 2020–21. ↩
[2] Wolke (Cloud), 1971, is an offset lithograph in black and grey, catalogue raisonné Butin 37. See the Christie’s catalogue entry. The response to the cloud’s placement above the sea is my reading of the image. ↩
[3] Examples of Hideaki Yamanobe’s monotypes are documented by Japan Art – Galerie Friedrich Müller. ↩
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