Hans Ulrich Obrist Book Signing - Entretiens avec Gerhard Richter
- Place
- Bookshop
The Fondation is offering a book signing of Conversations with Gerhard Richter by Hans Ulrich Obrist in the bookshop.
Free access with your ticket to the Gerhard Richter exhibition.
As a teenager, Hans Ulrich Obrist met the already highly renowned Gerhard Richter in Bern at the opening of an exhibition, where Richter took him under his wing. Over the decades, they went on to conduct numerous conversations, now finally brought together and edited here.
Obrist’s vast knowledge and inquisitive mind make him a singular interlocutor for an artist whose work spans more than 60 years, from hyperrealist painting to overpainted photography, from glass to printmaking, from watercolour to books. Obrist skilfully guides the reader through a wide range of subjects and offers an invaluable historical perspective on Richter’s place in the art world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The topics discussed range from Richter’s position in art history to artists’ books, as well as architecture, religion, unrealised projects, and the advice he gives to young artists.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist, born in 1968 in Zurich, is Artistic Director of the Serpentine in London and Senior Advisor to the LUMA Foundation in Arles. He has also worked as a curator at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first exhibition, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. He is the author, published by Éditions du Seuil, of Une vie in progress and Conversations du Louvre (2023).
Gerhard Richter
Initially working in the academic tradition taught at Dresden Art Academy (in East Germany at that time), Gerhard Richter took up photography in the early 1960s, continuing on from the "capitalist realism" of his early works, reflecting upon painting and the purpose of art.
Marked by the experience of the war years, he found in this medium a critical distance from which to approach subjects in which politics and history are closely linked to the personal realm. Throughout his career, Richter has reproduced magazine and newspaper photographs as well as his own photographs of friends and family. At the same time he has developed a form of abstraction using coloured lines, gestural abstraction and monochrome. In this way, Richter revisits – not without an ironic distance – the history of painting, romantic and sublime themes, and geometric and lyrical abstraction. More than a parallelism, this coexistence between figuration and abstraction is like a mise en abyme, echoing the material depth of the “scratched” surface and of photographic elements perceived through other layers, or the mental depth in form of certain titles that refer to atmospheres, natural elements or people’s names. Rather than being reductive and conceptual, this lifetime’s research is radical in the way it hesitates between erasing and revealing.
