Martin Herbert writing on Gerhard Richter for Apollo
For three decades, he could increasingly do anything, while coolly suggesting that perhaps none of it mattered in the grand scheme of things, even as his paintings also persistently whispered that maybe it did. Like so much great art, his can be endlessly revisited due to its fathoms-deep ambiguity. Look at an earlyish, unassuming canvas like Bridge (at the Seaside) (1969): a spit of land and outstretching bridge forming a horizon line under a delicately blueing, star-dotted evening sky, nobody around, the lower half fuzzily ambiguous: maybe it’s water, maybe beach, maybe half of each. Here is a casual, banal, snapshot-style update of the German landscape tradition, a knowingly minor thing. Yet it’s also somehow hushed and beautiful, almost tender—everything and nothing swirling together for you to tease apart or accept, finally, as indivisible.
I had wanted to avoid exhausted, but maybe I need to get to the Fondation Louis Vuitton Richter retrospective after all, for the acceptance of indivisibility
Gerhard Richter at Full Scale [apollo-magazine]