Richtered

Artists are always in dialogue with the past, present, and future. For readers and viewers of their work, the act of interpretation is creative too; images are never seen or considered in pure isolation. They speak to each other, merge and collide to create new forms and associations far richer than an artist’s intentions.

These were some of the ideas I was playing with when creating Richtered in 2012. At the time, I was reading Gerhard Richter’s Texts and Ed Ruscha’s Leave Any Information at the Signal. Though on opposing sides of the Atlantic, each artist appropriated from the images and language that surrounded them in post-war Germany and the USA, and each denied any overt expression of meaning in their work, focusing instead on the sounds and shapes of words and phrases, and on the elusive nature of photographs and memory.

As a reader and viewer moving between these two artists’ words and oeuvres, I  discovered new meanings and dialogues between the painters’ works. The result is Richtered, in which the word paintings of Ruscha are superimposed onto the blurred photorealist monochromes of Richter to create new associations and meanings between two contemporary old masters.