27.9.94 1994

Gerhard Richter made this photograph with paint on September 27th, 1994. It's a strange hybrid of painting and photography that challenges the hierarchies of the art world. Richter came of age in post-war Germany, where artists struggled to find new ways to represent reality after the horrors of Nazism. He co-founded the Capitalist Realism movement in the 1960s as a commentary on the social and political landscape of Germany. The movement reflected the influence of both American Pop Art and Soviet Social Realism. Like other artists of the time, he questioned the role of art in a society that was rapidly changing due to technological advancements and globalization. This piece is a striking example of Richter's interest in exploring the relationship between abstraction and representation. By layering paint onto a photograph, he disrupts our perception of reality and invites us to question the nature of images. To understand it fully, we might delve into studies of postwar German art and its engagement with questions of history, memory, and representation.