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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection for more than two decades, Gerhard Richter’s Gilbert & George (1975) represents an extraordinary meeting of minds. The eponymous British duo, famed for their radical collaborative practice, are captured in one of the most visually intriguing photo-paintings in Richter’s oeuvre. Based on a photograph of five exposures, it shows George twice—close-up, his doubled spectacles intersecting at different angles—coalescing with three images of Gilbert, who appears in profile, seated in a wicker chair, and as a small silhouette behind George’s ear. Richter’s soft, translucent brushwork creates a virtuoso mirage of overlaid features, and a superb portrait of two artists whose merged identities are central to their life’s work.
Richter had met Gilbert & George in 1970, at their first exhibition in the Düsseldorf gallery of Konrad Fischer. When they returned for another show four years later, they asked him to paint their portraits. The project resulted in eight paintings, which Fischer exhibited at his gallery in 1975. Among these, two were acquired by Gilbert & George themselves; two are now part of the Artist Rooms Collection at Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland; and another is in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Richter has been investigating the truth-claims of painting and photography since the 1960s. For him they are equally unreliable as ways of comprehending reality: both no more than arrangements of colour which, examined closely, dissolve into abstraction. The characteristic blurring of his photo-paintings—which operate in tandem with his abstract pictures—serves as a reminder of the illusory nature of appearance, making his portraits particularly enigmatic. In his landmark greyscale series 48 Portraits (1971-1972, Museum Ludwig, Cologne), made for the 1972 Venice Biennale, he showcased the anonymising effect of his technique on a line-up of great personalities from history. He included no artists, because, he said, they would have been too close to himself. Across his career he made a few rare exceptions. Artists he has painted include the Warhol superstar Brigid Polk, his friend Günther Uecker, his second wife, Isa Genzken, and Gilbert & George.
In London in 1969, just a few years after Richter made his first photo-painting, Gilbert & George declared themselves to be ‘living sculptures.’ Wearing a uniform of near-identical suits, they have rarely been seen apart since. They are the primary subject of their own performances, drawings and photographic constructions—all of which they regard, too, as sculptures. Centred around their stylised partnership, they have created a Gesamtkunstwerk that collapses the distinctions between art and life, and blurs the two men into a single artist-figure. By the time Richter painted them in 1975, Gilbert & George were taking place on the world stage. Andy Warhol would make three silkscreened double portraits of the pair—based on his own Polaroid photographs—the following year.
Gilbert & George visited Richter at home in Düsseldorf, where they held a photography session in the garden. Approaching his subjects from different angles and at varied distances, he repeatedly exposed the same section of film—rather than advancing the film in the camera after each shot—to create double or multiple exposures that would form the basis for his paintings. This technique had been used in early photographic works by avant-garde artists including El Lissitzky, Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and—more recently, and to richly psychedelic effect—by Richter’s colleague Sigmar Polke. In 1970 Richter had made his own double photo-portraits with Polke that superimposed the two artists’ faces, in a statement of fused identity that foreshadowed the Gilbert & George paintings.
‘I liked them as outsiders, above all’, Richter recalled. ‘… With Gilbert & George, too, I liked the very nostalgic side. They were the first people who liked my landscapes’ (G. Richter in conversation with H. U. Obrist, 1993, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 298-299). The couple, like Richter, were working against the tide in a period dominated by Minimal and Conceptual art. Self-declared traditionalists, they had depicted themselves wandering through bucolic scenery in works such as The Nature of Our Looking (1970, Tate, London). Richter’s own landscape and seascape paintings of this time, based on his photographs, played provocatively with echoes of nineteenth-century German Romanticism. The Gilbert & George portraits allowed him to take up another Romantic motif: friendship, as celebrated by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, who depicted paired figures sharing aesthetic experiences in nature.
With its synthesis of melding, interlocking and overlaid visages, Richter’s photo-painting perfectly pictures Gilbert & George’s compound identity. Their union, of course, is part of their own artistic scheme: a formalised construction, complete with matching suits, that creates an artificial image around which their wider project revolves. In that sense, like all appearances, it is an illusion. Gilbert & George thus introduces further complexity to the dialogue between the camera’s vision, the painted mark and our sensory apprehension of the world that lies at the heart of Richter’s own practice. An elegant emblem of a unique artistic relationship, it is also a remarkably multi-layered example of his work.
Richter had met Gilbert & George in 1970, at their first exhibition in the Düsseldorf gallery of Konrad Fischer. When they returned for another show four years later, they asked him to paint their portraits. The project resulted in eight paintings, which Fischer exhibited at his gallery in 1975. Among these, two were acquired by Gilbert & George themselves; two are now part of the Artist Rooms Collection at Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland; and another is in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Richter has been investigating the truth-claims of painting and photography since the 1960s. For him they are equally unreliable as ways of comprehending reality: both no more than arrangements of colour which, examined closely, dissolve into abstraction. The characteristic blurring of his photo-paintings—which operate in tandem with his abstract pictures—serves as a reminder of the illusory nature of appearance, making his portraits particularly enigmatic. In his landmark greyscale series 48 Portraits (1971-1972, Museum Ludwig, Cologne), made for the 1972 Venice Biennale, he showcased the anonymising effect of his technique on a line-up of great personalities from history. He included no artists, because, he said, they would have been too close to himself. Across his career he made a few rare exceptions. Artists he has painted include the Warhol superstar Brigid Polk, his friend Günther Uecker, his second wife, Isa Genzken, and Gilbert & George.
In London in 1969, just a few years after Richter made his first photo-painting, Gilbert & George declared themselves to be ‘living sculptures.’ Wearing a uniform of near-identical suits, they have rarely been seen apart since. They are the primary subject of their own performances, drawings and photographic constructions—all of which they regard, too, as sculptures. Centred around their stylised partnership, they have created a Gesamtkunstwerk that collapses the distinctions between art and life, and blurs the two men into a single artist-figure. By the time Richter painted them in 1975, Gilbert & George were taking place on the world stage. Andy Warhol would make three silkscreened double portraits of the pair—based on his own Polaroid photographs—the following year.
Gilbert & George visited Richter at home in Düsseldorf, where they held a photography session in the garden. Approaching his subjects from different angles and at varied distances, he repeatedly exposed the same section of film—rather than advancing the film in the camera after each shot—to create double or multiple exposures that would form the basis for his paintings. This technique had been used in early photographic works by avant-garde artists including El Lissitzky, Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and—more recently, and to richly psychedelic effect—by Richter’s colleague Sigmar Polke. In 1970 Richter had made his own double photo-portraits with Polke that superimposed the two artists’ faces, in a statement of fused identity that foreshadowed the Gilbert & George paintings.
‘I liked them as outsiders, above all’, Richter recalled. ‘… With Gilbert & George, too, I liked the very nostalgic side. They were the first people who liked my landscapes’ (G. Richter in conversation with H. U. Obrist, 1993, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 298-299). The couple, like Richter, were working against the tide in a period dominated by Minimal and Conceptual art. Self-declared traditionalists, they had depicted themselves wandering through bucolic scenery in works such as The Nature of Our Looking (1970, Tate, London). Richter’s own landscape and seascape paintings of this time, based on his photographs, played provocatively with echoes of nineteenth-century German Romanticism. The Gilbert & George portraits allowed him to take up another Romantic motif: friendship, as celebrated by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, who depicted paired figures sharing aesthetic experiences in nature.
With its synthesis of melding, interlocking and overlaid visages, Richter’s photo-painting perfectly pictures Gilbert & George’s compound identity. Their union, of course, is part of their own artistic scheme: a formalised construction, complete with matching suits, that creates an artificial image around which their wider project revolves. In that sense, like all appearances, it is an illusion. Gilbert & George thus introduces further complexity to the dialogue between the camera’s vision, the painted mark and our sensory apprehension of the world that lies at the heart of Richter’s own practice. An elegant emblem of a unique artistic relationship, it is also a remarkably multi-layered example of his work.