Gerhard Richter opening at David Zwirner West 20th | New York | March 2023

You wait that long in a line you’re usually going in sceptical. I aint complaining bout this line though, plenty to look at, the weather is warming for the first time in bitter weeks and everyone is beautiful. It’s New York on the cusp of spring, as the sun goes down and the breeze elicits goosebumps not chapped lips. At the entrance people walk past the line and straight into the gallery without waiting and I realise the line just an exercise in collective acceptance – if you only see people lining up you assume there is a reason, so you join the end. The guy at the door gave preference to those walking past the line, a reminder that the US is founded on individual gain – I’ll remember that one for next time. Just in front of the gallery entrance a young man sits above us all on the roof of a box truck smoking a cigarette as the sun bleeds orange into the Hudson River.

You walk into a room that crowded you’re gonna be distracted from the paintings. Abstract paintings. Big and small, rigid paintings of thick colours pulled across hard canvas. I weave through the crowd to the big painting at the closest end of the large room and end up standing alongside my queue-mates, who took alternate routes to the same destination. Two young women, who spent their time in line talking about housing in different cities and an imminent encounter with a boy who ended things badly. Three old art-farts, wonderful people really, ‘no I will be in France then’, ‘yes Barbara Kruger was there and toured me around her show’, Do you think Gerhard is here? Surely ensconced in some back room to avoid the throng’. Two very different demographics, both arrive at the first painting with iPhone camera open. I mean, we waited long enough for that photo.  

I stare at these paintings and am slowly consumed against my will. I stare into these paintings. They are all technique and commitment. A man interviews people in the crowd, I think, if he asked me whether I liked these paintings, what would I say? ‘No, but I respect his commitment’. You only need know a little about Richter to know that he thinks deeply about his work. His back catalogue is a rigorous, lifelong investigation of perfection and elegance, the pursuit of pure beauty, and of beauty in or alongside ugly. I respect Gerhard Richter immensely. A yellow and red piece, primary colours with dirty green pulled across it, white scrapings like they were made with a thumb poked into a rag. All the easy ajdectives go first - bold, energetic, rich, layered. But this painting is a contradiction, completely manic and yet elegant. It makes me think of roadwork signs and work sites, it is fire and forest. This painting is composed. The colours are perfect, I could look at it all day. And I’m sucked in. I finish the room of maybe 20 oil paintings. Some are purple, turquoise, red, ultramarine blue, awful colours! All in one canvas, somehow harmonious, somehow mature! I suggest his use of white as substance has something to do with this. They are successful paintings, perhaps among the most successful collection of abstract pictures I’ve seen.



Then there are three more rooms, filled with more beautiful people, still distracted, catching eyes, falling in love, again and again… The walls of the three following rooms are lined with at least 100 framed ink drawings (grayscale in two, colour in the third) made recently in 2022. I try to take the admiration from the previous room with me, but it doesn’t make the journey. I look at one black and white ink picture, I walk past six and look at another. It is incredible how seriously people take a thing based on its context. My fellow audience members take their time and look with earnest (but indifference) at these works, which I don’t like. These are farmers-market artworks and yet they hang on prestigious walls. I wonder if Zwirner is selling the works in this show? The pack of suited chauffeurs standing around a cavalcade of Chevrolets on the street outside would suggest they are. The grayscale pictures are the result of a very wet brush hitting ink and paper, with lines drawn in fine-liner pen once dried. This is Gerhard Richter were talking about… They look like a highschool student’s folio experiment. When you rely on nothing more than the natural result of a technique or medium, is it art or craft? What is the difference between these and the resin ‘art’ that the person you somehow still have on facebook posts online? The colour pictures are the same, heavily diluted ink blotches on paper. These offer some colour palettes, which is (just) more generous. I have always thought that Mark Rothko’s colour-scapes could be the most accurate or literal depictions of emotional landscapes in existence, non-figurative but very physical and substantial as emotions are. An interpretation, one of the luxuries afforded to the audience of abstract art. But beneath the signature on each of these coloured works, Richter has written the word ‘mood’…

Did he really need to spell it out?

I turn to leave and as I do, unintentionally stare directly into the sculpture in the centre of the room. I am stopped dead. Three panes of glass bordered by a huge silver (steel) frame with two perpendicular crossbars connecting them. We walked around it on the way in but looking at it head-on, seeing the people on the other side of this monument – looking through it, felt like something of great significance. I don’t know what it was and I am getting too tired for verbosity, but it struck me. I thought, this man understands power and beauty. Tenderness and brutality. So precise, so elegant, so industrial but so human, which is the point. I watch the whole beautiful pack move in and out of my life through this frame. The corners of my mouth turn up in a smile as I leave the show. These big exhibitions feel like the difference between seeing a band play a crowded live show and carefully listening to their songs alone. I wonder whether I expect art to be too personal. It can and should be both public, participatory and personal.



I leave past the oil paintings. Industrial. Peruse the books, don’t buy one, open the door and leave. The man smoking on the roof of the truck is still there and has now lit his book on fire. He holds it in his hand watching the spine slowly burn, alone at the edge of the crowd. I walk towards home and a block away from the throng a smartly dressed man on his way to the gallery crouches low in the gutter to take a photo of a crushed cigarette packet on his phone...

I walk another block towards my apartment, the smell of burning book hangs in the thin, cool air. Is art dead?

No.