Astrid Honold
Strokes and Stripes: Thoughts on the application of photography in the work of Gerhard Richter
Profiting from remarkable courage, steadfast awareness and impeccable discipline, Gerhard Richter has managed to intertwine two extremely urgent concerns of our time: The dark, cultural, and intellectual legacy of the Second World War and the quest for the status of the image; the possibilities of pictorial representation in times of photography and digitization, the frequently proclaimed ‘end of art’, as well as a seemingly complete breakdown of all boundaries of art’s own concept. Photography, in its many forms was, and remains, of prime importance in all of this and is, in its many forms, therefore essentially and significantly present and instrumental in the painterly oeuvre of Gerhard Richter.
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Philosophical and aesthetic questions concerning truth and reality, or depiction and representation, have driven the arts of all periods and must therefore lie before a differentiation between analogue or digital principles within the medium of photography. By placing Richter’s work in a conceptual frame of dialectic materialism – which, from several biographical hints would appear a legitimate positioning – it is possible to ask why this transition for him went so evidently and smoothly without ever losing specific relevance.
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Looking at the smallest unit of imagery, (elementary particles of the depiction, be it pigment, grain, halftone dots or pixels), as a phenomenological thinking experiment helps one understand that Richter is looking for mediation between a dialectic which comes before the depiction. For this reason he can, like no other, make the switch into our digital age. His initial quest has become increasingly important in our precarious visual age with its continuous stream of imagery on the internet and a new search for reality and truth.
Biographical notes
Astrid Honold is a German art historian focusing on artistic practice and the application of photography in painting. She is the founder of Black Cat Publishing and wrote her MA thesis Blur in Motion on the ‘Blur as a mediating movement in the work of Gerhard Richter’. In her PhD dissertation Knight Moves to Remis, for which she is awarded the state of Berlin’s Elsa Neumann scholarship, she investigates the ‘structural influence of chess theory and practice on the organization of Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre’. In 2016 two research articles on the topic have been published in France and the UK. Honold is the editor of the monograph Fendry Ekel – Entries to be published by LM in 2017, contributes to conferences and curates exhibitions for galleries and museums internationally.