Exhibitions
Warhol, Polke, Richter: In the Power of Painting 1
May 4 – September 7, 2001
Some forty exhibits from the Daros Collection will be on display, comprising works by one American and two German artists who have devoted themselves to painting, thereby exploring and extending its potential: Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Sigmar Polke (1941) and Gerhard Richter (1932).
Doubts were repeatedly expressed in the 20th century about the contemporary significance and relevance of painting, although ultimately that genre, with all its rich traditions, was never abandoned. On the contrary: a representative selection of pictures shows how artistic forms of expression, examined and redefined, have become open to hitherto uncharted areas of reality.
Before putting his decision to become an artist into practice in 1960, Andy Warhol worked as a commercial graphic designer. While his success in that field was based on a deliberately intimate and craftsmanlike style, his achievement as an artist rests, in contrast, on a depersonalized concept avoiding the use of any individual handwriting. A similar contradiction appears in his choice of themes: this outstanding exponent of Pop Art did not work from actual objects but from images of them—photographs, diagrams, and advertising graphics. This approach is also one explanation for the encyclopedic dimension of his themes.
The complexity of Warhol’s art derives from a sense of uncertainty. Thematic variety contrasts with formal regularity, and the pictorial reproduction of reality rivals reality itself, or as Warhol himself put it: “I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts.”
It was also at the beginning of the 1960s that Gerhard Richter discovered photography, more specifically amateur and newspaper photographs, which were to serve him henceforth as models for his objective pictures. In this the painter, who had trained in Dresden and moved to Cologne in 1961, was liberating himself from both the politically motivated painting of the East and the subjectively centered style of the West. Deliberately ignoring considerations of composition, style and personal handwriting, he paints such things as furniture, secretaries, townscapes, landscapes, animals. This concentration on the factual world enables him to formulate and carry out an artistic exploration of the limits and possibilities of painting. Richter’s own craftsmanship, his handling of paint, the paintbrush and other tools are thus central to his work. The apparent contradiction between the figurative and the abstract becomes meaningless: Richter’s work switches effortlessly between depiction of the real world and pure painting.
The German economic miracle was already well under way when, in the late sixties, Sigmar Polke began satirizing the new German gemütlichkeit in his painting: kidney-shaped tables, palm trees, pairs of herons, and African sculptures. To demonstrate the insignificance of these petit-bourgeois aspirations and point out the perils of the consumer culture, he developed two methods of deconstruction: dotscreen pictures and painting on industrially printed textiles. Both the fabric and its pattern are extremely impersonal, concealing more than they reveal. In the dotscreen pictures, too, the world appears as a mere pattern which can be taken to pieces and reassembled. Polke deconstructs in order to establish the visibility of reality and the reality of the image, “to see the one as a model, the other as something in its own right.”
Pivotal to the exhibition In the Power of Painting 1 are pictures from the important group of works by Warhol in the Daros Collection. In addition, a separate room is devoted to Warhol’s artistic creations of 1960 to 1963, tracing his development from hand-painted pictures to silkscreen paintings. Another highlight consists of comparable works by all three artists on the subject of disasters—instances of collective and individual catastrophe.