A review of Gerhard Richter’s 2023 show at Zwirner was built on a decade-old anecdote where the reviewer’s non-art savvy date dismissed his art for looking “like something that would be in the lobby of a bank.”
Zwirner presented that show as Richter’s last paintings. Which, last squeegee paintings, maybe, but we now know Zwirner had to know there were more paintings in the queue. He had to have known of the commission for Richter to make at least two more massive paintings—for the lobby of a bank. Not just any bank, though, or any lobby: JP Morgan Chase’s menacing, new giga-headquarters at 270 Park Avenue. Color Chase One and Color Chase Two, jagged compositions of enamel on interlocking aluminum panels, recently unveiled with no creation date, were not a quick project.
Andrew Russeth saw a connection to Richter’s color chart paintings, and I’d zoom in on the mega-chart, 4900 Farben/4900 Colours (2007) whose 196 reconfigurable aluminum panels match the Chase works in scale, material, process, and corporate sponsorship [It was made for LVMH.] I’d even guess that 93yo Richter began these works à la Matisse, by cutting up reproductions of 4900 Colours and rearranging the shards. [This project, these works, could be the subject of a show, or a book. 4900 Colors has its own micro-site. But since the dawn of the Zwirner era, Richter’s once exhaustive website looks like it stopped trying to keep up.]
Anyway, Andrew Russeth not incorrectly judged the Chase paintings to be “punchy, pleasantly awkward, and ultimately forgettable: perfect corporate-lobby art.” To which Richter trueheads can only respond, “Hell, yeah!” Lobby art is actually an entire subcategory of Richter’s work.
Richter’s works at JPMC end a six-year drought of Richter Lobby Art in New York City. In the middle of a financial crisis in 2019, Deutsche Bank removed and sold Faust (1980), a 3×7-meter abstract triptych that hung in the lobbies of its NY headquarters, first on 52nd Street, across from MoMA, and then on Wall Street, in a postmodern Roche Dinkeloo tower originally built for JP Morgan. Just as all banks merge into one, so do Richter’s lobby paintings; the Chase works could just as easily have been composed by running Faust era abstractions through a Voronoi filter.
Though it was his first bank lobby work, Faust was not Richter’s first bargain with a corporate devil. In 1973 he delivered Red, Yellow, Blue, a trio of massive—let’s just stipulate from here on that all the lobby works are massive—paintings of photographic details of brushstrokes for BMW’s Münich headquarters. In 2023, they were restored for their 50th anniversary.
In 1986 Richter provided Victoria I and Victoria II, a pair of 6×4-meter abstract paintings, for the Düsseldorf lobby of Victoria Haus, the headquarters of one of Germany’s oldest insurance companies. It has since merged to become ERGO Group, which is itself a subsidiary of Munich Re. The paintings flank ERGO’s entry and are signature works for the company, which is known in all its many incarnations as a major Richter collector and sponsor.
In 2015 Goppion created massive climate-controlled vitrines to protect them.
The way Twelve mirrors for a bank (CR 740, 1991) and Six mirrors for a bank (CR 741, 1991) are titled and described on the artist’s website, I’m going to guess they are not signature works for Hypo-bank, which is now also something and somewhere else. The bank put the works in storage in 2010 when they moved out of the Düsseldorf headquarters they were commissioned for, and their current status is unknown.
I actually cannot find any installation shots, and even the pictures on Richter’s website are incomplete and look like diagrams. On the bright side, perhaps these unsatistfying projects broke the creative soil that let future works bloom.
In 1999 Richter installed Black, Red Yellow (CR 859, 1999), a six-panel mirror painting, in the Reichstag, the lobby of the reunified nation.
When the paintings in bank lobbies were replaced by museum branches in bank lobbies, Richter obliged. Eight Grey (CR 878/1-8, 2001) was commissioned by Deutsche Bank for the Guggenheim it hosted in Berlin. The 500 x 270 cm enameled glass works were mounted at angles on steel brackets, skewing their reflections. Kanazawa got an earlier, slightly smaller version. [Which looks miserably installed. And frankly, straight photos of Berlin’s didn’t look much better. Clearly Dia Beacon’s six-mirror variant has raised expectations.]
As the Eight Grey works show, Richter and bank lobbies began to diverge in the 21th century, and art spaces stood ready to accommodate his monumentality. Strontium (CR 888, 2004) is a 9×9.5-meter grid of 130 c-prints made for Wilsey Court, the central party space of the De Young Museum’s Herzog & de Meuron building. The 196 panels of 4900 Farben (2007), made for the new Fondation Louis Vuitton, could be reconfigured in eleven different ways, optimized for a variety of spaces. Meanwhile, the related stained glass window at the Köln cathedral (2006) is right where it is, for—one hopes—ever.
But that’s almost twenty years ago. Was it the paintings that got small? Or the lobbies? I could easily see the Strips works as Richter making a stone cold play for the lobby art market, it’s possible Richter really was just done with the medium, until now. There must have been something special—or especially ominous—about the Chase space, and the challenge to make work for it. Because as expensive as it all looks, it cannot be simply about the bag.