"An award for the region": Gerhard Richter painted Garmisch

Created: 07/22/2022, 11:00 am

By: Tanja Brinkmann

One of the most expensive artists in the world: Gerhard Richter in his Cologne studio.

©Oliver Berg/dpa

His works hang in the most important museums in the world.

They are among the most expensive works by a living artist on the art market.

Gerhard Richter is regarded as an absolutely exceptional talent.

The fact that he also immortalized "Garmisch" on canvas is mentioned by Dr.

Constanze Werner "an award".

Garmisch-Partenkirchen

– Overcast with fog, partly snow-covered, with rugged rock faces in between.

It is an impressive picture that Gerhard Richter captured in oil on canvas.

One that tells of the forces of nature.

One that certainly doesn't invite you to pack your backpack and lace up your hiking boots.

"Exciting" says Dr.

Constanze Werner the work that the artist called "Garmisch".

In contrast to many who immortalized the Wetterstein massif before him, the native of Dresden decided against blue skies and sunshine.

Fully aware.

This also convinces the director of the Werdenfels Museum, as it also depicts a reality, just not a kitschy one. She calls it "a distinction for the region that Gerhard Richter has painted something here".

For them, the 90-year-old, who put down his paintbrush two years ago,

Atmospheric: Gerhard Richter captured the view of the Waxenstein in "Garmisch".

© Gerhard Richter

That is what fascinates Dr.

Sandra Uhrig, director of the Murnau Castle Museum.

"The best known are certainly his photorealistic pictures and his atlas" - photographs, newspaper clippings and sketches that the artist collected from the mid-1960s and arranged a little later on loose sheets.

But his abstract works, including one that was sold at Sotheby's auction house in 2012 for 26.4 million euros as the most expensive painting by a living artist, and the windows in Cologne Cathedral appeal to Uhrig.

To her delight, an original judge hangs in the reverse glass section of her home.

An "Ifrit", a spirit that the artist chose specifically for Murnau.

That too is a sensation.

For many visitors "a surprise effect, because they see that reverse glass painting is not only old folk art".

a scoop,

like the "very atmospheric" Garmisch picture, which the art historian thinks of the end of Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain".

The painting is privately owned and was last shown publicly in 2000 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Landscapes that are absolutely inhuman

"My landscapes aren't just beautiful or nostalgic, romantic or classic like lost paradises," the now 90-year-old noted in his notes.

Rather, they are "above all 'mendacious' (even if I didn't always find the means to show exactly that), and by 'mendacious' I mean the transfiguration with which we look at nature, nature in all its forms always against us, because it doesn't know meaning, nor grace, nor compassion, because it doesn't know anything, it's absolutely mindless, it's the total opposite of us, it's absolutely inhuman".

This is shown by his snowy landscapes from 1981 and 1982, among which "Garmisch" can also be found.

Garmisch motif first photographed, then painted

Richter probably came across the motif while passing through.

Coincidentally.

Probably on the way to Switzerland.

"Unfortunately, we can't say anything about how the picture came about," explains Konstanze Ell from Atelier Richter in Cologne when asked by the Tagblatt.

"I spoke to Mr. Richter about it, he can no longer remember the circumstances, it was too long ago." As so often, the artist captured the scene with his camera in order to later transfer it to canvas.

An image that looks like a blurred photo.

"I've never missed anything in a blurred picture," said Richter, who fled to Berlin in 1961 and now lives in Cologne, once in an interview.

“On the contrary, you see a lot more in it than in a sharp image.

A landscape painted with precision forces us to

to see a certain number of clearly distinguishable trees, while in a blurred landscape one can see any number of trees.

The picture is more open.”

"Great" that Gerhard Richter was inspired by the Wetterstein massif

Also because it is not 100 percent assignable.

Mayor Elisabeth Koch (CSU) is puzzled as to which motif Richter chose for his Garmisch image.

"The Alpspitze from the Graseck", it could be.

However, after consulting someone who knows the local mountains, she is convinced that he painted the view of the Waxenstein from the Rießersee.

For Koch, it is simply “great that such an artist has painted something from here”.

Not surprisingly, Richter was inspired by the Wetterstein massif.

"Our mountains are so distinctive, they emanate a very special power."