Fuji 2 1996

Gerhard Richter made this painting by dragging paint horizontally across the canvas, smearing different colours together, like wipers on a windshield. I can almost feel the artist's arm moving back and forth, layering and scraping. It makes me think about the physical act of painting, the push and pull, the struggle to find form. What was Richter thinking as he made this? Maybe he was wrestling with the ghosts of abstraction, trying to find a way to make a painting that was both present and absent, there and not there. Look at how the green bleeds into the white, and how the red sits heavy at the bottom, like a memory refusing to fade. I admire Richter's paintings because he always seems to be having a dialogue with other painters across time. Painting is always an exchange, a give and take, a conversation. It’s a form of embodied expression, full of ambiguity. Each viewer brings their own experiences, making new meanings.