Firenze

“Gerhard Richter produced his Firenze series in spring 2000. It consists of a total of 103 photographs that have been painted over by the artist…Richter has trimmed the originally rectangular prints down to a unified 12 x 12 centimetres square format. This format is that of a CD; the series was originally planned as an edition with accompanying music CD…the dates indicate neither the day of the take, nor the day of the overpainting, but, as titles, simply serve to identify and catalogue the works…The series opens with a presentation of the group of travellers, the artist in the circle of his family and friends. This is followed—as a kind of intermezzo—by black-and-white photographs of abstract details of pictorial surfaces…Despite their modest formats, these overpainted photographs concentrate Gerhard Richter’s main artistic concept: a skeptical questioning of our experiences of reality and an attempt to grasp that reality with the help of different painterly processes… Gerhard Richter repeatedly reconnoitred this border area, questioning, among other things, the concept of reality in naturalistic landscapes by way of later, abstract over paintings…Having gained some experience with this medium, he described the tense relationship between the different aspirations to reality of photography and painting in an interview: « Photography has almost no reality, it is quasi just picture. And painting always has reality; the paint is tangible, has presence: but it always results in a picture … I have taken small photographs which I then smeared with paint. This brought aspects of the problem together.”

-Florence, Hatje Kantz, 2001

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