Gerhard Richter in the Düsseldorf Museum Kunstpalast: Rhenish home game

They’re lining up outside and it’s been like this for weeks. The exhibition “Gerhard Richter. “Hidden Treasures” has brought the Düsseldorf Museum Kunstpalast a popular success. With it, the Rhineland is celebrating its most famous painter, who has been the undefeated number one in international artist rankings for many years. His auction results are in the millions. At the same time, the Rhineland celebrates itself, because the exhibition shows 120 works from around fifty Rhenish private collections.

It celebrates the region as an artistic breeding ground for the almost 93-year-old global star, who moved from the GDR to the West in 1961. On the Rhine he found an open-minded buyer base and a museum landscape that was receptive to his attempts. Anyone who gets into the exhibition after waiting a certain amount of time in front of the museum door will immediately see visitors proudly entering, obviously wanting to take a look at “their” picture – or that of friends and neighbors.

“Hidden Treasures” is a home game. The exhibition idea, which is as simple as it is ingenious, came about in Corona times while looking for a concept with shorter transport routes. The result was a sure-fire success. The loaners are said to have literally jostled to be there, even if most of them remained anonymous afterwards – they knew each other anyway.

The beautiful title “Hidden Treasures” therefore retains its meaning. Many of the works presented are being shown in an exhibition for the first time and then disappear from the public again. Their high esteem can be seen in the sometimes magnificent frames, monstrous Plexiglas hoods and sometimes even in the scraped corners when the treasure hangs too close to the heart.

The exhibition provides an overview of the Cologne-based artist’s diverse work from the 1960s to exactly 2017. In that year, Richter stopped producing his abstract paintings, which were painted with large, heavy squeegees, due to the physical strain. Today the artist only paints with oil in collages on postcard-sized photographs or draws.

The Düsseldorf course begins with a monumental window painting from 1968 owned by the museum itself, which addresses Richter’s constant shift between representation and abstraction. The white frames of the window depicted and its shadows against a gray background could just as easily be pure surfaces.

The inventory set up by curator Markus Heinzelmann ends with the last two large formats that left Richter’s studio and still radiate energy: a cheeky light green wipes across the dark surface, a cheeky pink pushes forward. As always, the work number is pedantically mentioned in the title as additional information: “Abstract Image (950-1)” and “Abstract Image (950-2)”. Richter always kept precise records, so that despite the temperament of his abstract outbursts, calculation remains noticeable.

There are no surprises in the exhibition; like the Rhenish collectors, it faithfully follows Richter’s vicissitudes: from the blurred paintings created from photographs to the gray pictures, from the landscapes to the color sample panels, from the “soft abstractions” to the heartfelt portrait of his im A son sitting in a children’s chair and a flower still life. In the 1980s, most private collectors had to pass up as the artist’s triumph in the United States began and prices soared.

When you think of Richter, you also think of his Stammheim cycle and the Birkenau pictures, and you also think of the political artist that he never wanted to be seen as. In Düsseldorf, his treatment of the German past is almost completely missing, with the exception of the painting named after Karl Schwärzler from 1964, which shows a fighter-bomber. The title “Schärzler” alludes to the director of the Heinkel aircraft factory, which had forced laborers from concentration camps work for them during National Socialism. The omitted “w” in the name of the chief designer makes a bitter joke about the Germans’ amnesia.

Gentle clouds and stubborn gray

With Richter, everything coexists equally: the gentle cloud mountains reminiscent of the Romantics as well as the stubborn gray images. The artist came across it when he was looking for new motifs to paint the canvas with it in the mid-1960s. “Over time (…) I noticed differences in quality between the gray areas and also that they showed none of the destructive motivation. The pictures began to teach me,” he later explained the beginnings of this series.

“My pictures are smarter than me,” is another quip of his. In the Düsseldorf exhibition, one stands in amazement at how many directions they took the painter, who above all wanted his artistic freedom and yet succeeded in much more: bringing an entire genre to blossom anew.