I’m ready to look at Gerhard Richter mirrors all day, but I confess, I’d forgotten completely about his Panes of Glass. Not the sculptural ones, like the iconic 4 Panes of Glass (1967) set into pivoting steel frames. But the singles. [a couple of weeks later update: Reader, it gets worse. I forgot I’d posted about some of these two years ago. lol]
There’s a group of nine [?] works from 2002 that are named, Pane of Glass / Glasscheibe. Or were. The GR numbers 876-1 through 12 put an upper limit on the works, which seem to vary only in size. [876-6, one of two 876s in Panorama in 2012, has a title, Grau (hinter Glas), Grey (behind Glass), and now this series encompasses variations of framing and support, too.]
I absolutely love that Sotheby’s used the artist’s image to sell GR 876-7 last year, with the new title Antelio Glass. Did they photoshop out the painting reflected in it in Richter’s own photo, or did Richter take both variations before the sun moved? Is that Grau (hinter Glas) in the reflection?
I remember this Summer 2004 show at Marian Goodman, but tbqh, I do not remember the Richter. And I completely missed this show on Richter’s reflectivity and mirroring at Sies + Höke in Düsseldorf last year curated by Dieter Schwarz, where Antelio Glass (née Pane of Glass) GR 876-9‘s austerity feels like a visual respite. The whole thing looks fantastic, so shiny.
Goodman’s installation photo with the Lichtenstein in it helps me reconcile the forgetability of these works with their quiet awesomeness. Which, it turns out, depends on what’s around to be reflected in them. Or as Dietmar Elger puts it in a 2014 video for the Albertinum’s Strips & Glass show, which Sotheby’s uses as a giant pullquote, even though it’s about a larger multipane sculpture:
The crucial point is not [the sculpture’s] materiality – not the glass and metal as a contrast of materials. Richter is, rather, interested in the images that the panes of glass create, the reflections, the perspectives and the superimposed motifs that appear in them.
And as Sotheby’s added,
Antelio Glas sits late in the series, posing Richter’s remarkable philosophical enquiry into the constructed reality of pictorial space. A phenomenological visual experience engages the spectator in the complex dialectic at the interstice of figuration and abstraction, enabling the artist to emphasise the discrepancy between image and reality, while simultaneously embracing notions of enigma, uncertainty, and transience.
Yeah, I missed that in 2004. But I am absolutely here for it now.
[note: at some point I cannot determine, and for some reason I cannot pin down, I started using CR for Gerhard Richter’s work numbers, which feel like Catalogue Raisonné, so of course, what else could it be? And that may be because others publish with that convention, too. Maybe even the artist at various points. But Richter also often just publishes the number, raw, next to the title.
But in Benjamin Buchloh’s catalogue for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin installation of Eight Gray in 2002, the captions all use GR instead of CR. A note at the end of the captions reads, “Paintings and sculptures are numbered according to the artist’s archival system as indicated in Gerhard Richter, catalogue raisonne ” &c., &c. So for now, for these 2002 works, I am going with the OG, GR.]
Previously, related: Gerhard Richter Painted, on his last paintings, which are mirrors; and Gerhard Richter Facsimile Object, where he’s taking a selfie in the mirror edition he made for Museum Abteiberg.
Previously, not just related but one of the same damn things, from 2024: Behind Grey Behind Glass