CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/9/2022

Happy 90th Birthday Gerhard Richter, born OTD in 1932!

Perhaps German painter Gerhard Richter's best-known painting, "Betty" (1988) is reproduced from Panorama, the definitive, expanded Richter survey from D.A.P. and Tate. "The painting exudes a deep sense of nostalgia," Achim Borchardt-Hume writes, "Richter's adolescent daughter turns away from her father's attempt to freeze her appearance with his camera. By extension, she also turns away from the present-day viewer. The typical Richter blur softens the painting's photorealism and heightens the motif's romantic aura (not unlike a photograph taken with a soft-focus lens), while simultaneously acting as a reminder that what we are looking at is a painting, not a photograph. At the same time, it mimics the temporality of photography, which, as Roland Barthes so aptly demonstrated, always entrails a sense of loss, of not death, of something irretrievably gone."