Dark 1968

Gerhard Richter made this painting, called 'Dark', with oil paint, and probably a squeegee. I can just imagine him, lost in the studio, pushing the paint around, dark reds and blues mixing with earthy greens. There's a real battle going on here, a struggle with the medium itself. Richter is famous for his squeegee paintings, where he drags paint across the canvas, blurring and distorting the image. It’s kind of violent, right? Like he’s erasing as much as he’s creating. See that vertical slash of red on the left? It’s like a scar, a raw, exposed nerve. I wonder if he was thinking about landscape, or maybe a figure, before obliterating it with that swipe of the squeegee. He was always interested in how photographs bleed into painting. The way the paint is built up, layer upon layer, it's as if Richter is digging into the surface, searching for something hidden beneath. Painting, for Richter, is a way to question reality.