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BEN BRYNMOR FOWLER
Currently living in Ebisu, Tokyo. A lover of city living & city walking, cinema, music, fiction, currently writing a PhD on contemporary theatre in Britain and Germany, and developing an intense relationship with apple gadgets.

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Gerhard Richter: Panorama @ Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Thursday, 4pm. After half an hour queuing (qualifying it as a “blockbuster” exhibition, I guess?) I got in, and had a quasi-spiritual experience. It says something about how mediated by screens my daily experience has become that I was totally overwhelmed by the materiality of these artworks… the texture of the paint, the history of creation inscribed in the layers of the strokes, their dynamism (which I’ve ironically captured for you to see on screen). I felt like I could crawl inside these canvases. This art is made to appreciate in the flesh… although I must say I was left totally cold by the randomly generated arrangements of coloured plastic squares that run around the outer edge of the gallery (and are the prototype of his stained glass window design for Kölln Dom).

The great irony is that he often takes photographs as his subject, culled from magazines as well as family albums, and he often invokes the genre of photorealism in his painting. Through doing so, his work draws attention to the fallibility of such ‘realism’ - his canvases, which he frequently manipulates by dragging a squeegee through the still-wet oil paint, are like imperfect memory - about the process of trying to ‘process’ something, and its ultimate failure. 

And so I was most moved by his ‘september’ canvas. A work which I first started scrutinising because the title refers to my birth month, and blue is my favourite colour. I soon realised that this was an image of September 11th that I was looking at, the blue and grey smears suddenly re-configured themselves into something resembling towers against a crystal blue sky, one disappearing as it rose into a fog of smoke. Hidden somewhere inside the smudged layers was the ghost of an image I sat watching all day on the TV, 11 years ago. I’m reading Falling Man by Don DeLillo at the moment, and saw the film of Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud… a couple of weeks ago. With those works, which I found frustrating, and talking with a loved one who has just written a PhD on post 9/11 cinema, I totally agree with her conclusion that it’s still impossible to process those events meaningfully in a work of art. A thesis that, ironically, Richter’s imperfect canvas, about a day which most of the world experienced mediated through a screen of one type or another, eloquently supports.

A second joy of this exhibition was experiencing the stunning Mies van der Rohe (Bauhaus) building, all soaring planes of glass and free-standing walls, which offered a beautiful counterpoint to Richter’s work, as well as an ideal space in which to look at other people looking at art. 

Architecture Gerhard Richter Mies van der Rohe art bauhaus Berlin Germany
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  1. grueeeneraelaefant reblogged this from fussgaenger
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  3. dramaticallyyours reblogged this from selysias-treasures
  4. viewsofberlin reblogged this from fussgaenger and added:
    Great photos, wonderful description....Berlin-Tiergarten
  5. selysias-treasures reblogged this from fussgaenger and added:
    Berlin-Tiergarten
  6. selysias-treasures said: Your description is a very strong incentive for me to go see it myself. But believe me, half an hour of queuing is not so blockbuster… For the MoMA exhibition, people had to wait in line for an hour minimum :D
  7. nightswimming said: nice pics. i photographed the Neu Galerie empty two years ago. impressive! flickr.com/photos/…
  8. fussgaenger posted this