GREGOIRE
JEANMONOD
Art and its stories as an inspiration
Gerhard Richter
Woman going down the Staircase
1965
Putting our sources in the spotlight
From the beginning of this practice - and for more than 50
years now - Richter carefully recorded
all the photographs having nourished and inspired his work as a painter in a
collection in several volumes that he has
baptized "the Atlas" . Today rich
thousands of images arranged on more than
800 sheets of large format, this im-
mense photo album has always been
Richter's eyes as important as the works that he took from it. So that
as early as 1972, when the Atlas had only 315 images, he decided to exhibit its contents in the same way as his paintings. An operation repeated many times since, as if to invite the public to enter its universe and to contemplate in turn these photos, banal or sublime, to which he owes so much.
The German Gerhard Richter, who is one of the most important figures of the 20th and 21st centuries, has produced throughout his career a
work very heterogeneous, ranging from the hyper-
the most advanced realism to the abstraction
more radical . But what made him known,
in the 1960s, these were the paintings
which he himself described as "photo-
paintings". From photographs -
taken from newspapers or his albums of
family - Richter makes canvases of
large format reproducing the image ori gi-
nal with, often, a blur effect introducing a distance with reality as with the photograph itself. A way for the artist to free himself from the question of the subject and its interpretation to concentrate solely on his art: painting.
Gerhard Richter, Atlas, Plate 13 , 1964
What we can take away:
​
We all have projects that are close to our hearts, ideas that we are proud of and that We were inspired, directly or indirectly, by already existing concepts. Revealing these sources of inspiration takes nothing away from the value or even the originality of our ideas. On the contrary this makes it possible to define their origins, and therefore to make them better understood and appreciated... while demonstrating a healthy humility.