Page 28 - The MoMA/ Guggenheim issue of World of Art magazine (2001)

MoMA The Museum of Moder Art New York

THE MusEuM Of MODERN ART
February 2002-
PREsENTs fIRsT NEW YORK NEW YORK Gerhard Richter:
RETROsPECTIVE Of PAINTINGs BY Forty Years of Painting is the first full-scale survey of the
paintings of the influential German artist ever mounted
GERHARD RICHTER in New York as well as the most comprehensive overview
of the artist’s work yet seen in North America. The
GERHARD RICHTER: exhibition, among the largest MoMA has ever devoted
to a contemporary artist, presents 188 canvases from
fORTY YEARs Of PAINTING every phase of Richter’s career, from 1962 to today. This
exhibition demonstrates the artist’s mastery of diverse
ExHIBITION’s fOCus ON PAINTINGs REVEALs THE genres, including gestural abstractions, landscapes,
MuLTIfACETED NATuRE Of RICHTER’s WORK AND HIs portraits, and other photo-based pictures, as well as the
MAsTERY Of MuLTIPLE GENREs OVER THE COuRsE Of vitality of painting as a mode of expression. Richter’s
HIs CAREER diverse body of work calls into question many widely
THE ExHIBITION Is ORGANIZED BY ROBERT sTORR, held attitudes about the inherent importance of stylistic
sENIOR CuRATOR, DEPARTMENT Of PAINTING AND consistency, the “organic” evolution of individual artistic
sCuLPTuRE, THE MusEuM Of MODERN ART NEW sensibility, the spontaneous nature of creativity, and
YORK the relationship of technological means and mass media
imagery to traditional studio methods and formats. While
fEBRuARY 14–MAY 21, 2002 many contemporary postmodernists have explored these
issues by circumventing or dismissing painting as a viable
artistic option, Richter has challenged painting to meet the
demands posed by new forms of
conceptual art. Gerhard Richter:
Forty Years of Painting is
organized by Robert Storr, Senior
Curator, Department of Painting
and Sculpture, The Museum of
Modern Art.

has long
Richter been a
greatly respected figure in
Europe, but, Storr states, “the
fact remains that compared to
American contemporaries of
similar achievement—Jasper
Johns and Robert Ryman,
to name two—Richter is
relatively unfamiliar to the
general American public and
still insufficiently known or
understood by the dedicated
audience of modern art.” Two
exhibitions of Richter’s work
have been shown in the United
States: a twenty-two-painting
overview at the Wadsworth
Atheneum in Hartford,
Connecticut, in 1987 and an
eighty-painting survey that
opened at the Art Gallery of
Ontario in Toronto in 1988 and
then traveled to the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago,
the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden in Washington,
D.C., and the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. Over

26 WORLD of ART