Gerhard Richter, "22.9.94", 1994, Oil on colour photograph, 17.9 x 12.7 cm / 7 x 5 in, © Gerhard Richter 2023, Olbricht Collection, Photo: Tino Kukulies, Düsseldorf
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16 December 2023 to 13 April 2024: The Nietzsche House, the Segantini Museum and the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in St. Moritz organise a joint exhibition entitled “Gerhard Richter: Engadin“, curated by Dieter Schwarz.
Gerhard Richter, born in 1932, is one of the most important and celebrated artists of our time. His works can be found in international collections and have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Europe and the United States. Richter first vacationed in Sils in the Upper Engadin in 1989 and has regularly visited the location during both summer and winter holidays for over 25 years. Presented across three venues in the Upper Engadin – Nietzsche-Haus, the Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth in St. Moritz – ‘Gerhard Richter: Engadin’ is the first exhibition to explore Richter’s deep connection with the Alpine valley landscape. More than seventy works from museums and private collections – including paintings, overpainted photographs, drawings and objects – are testament to the artist’s fascination with the Upper Engadin valley.
On view at the Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth are paintings that Richter created from photographs taken during his hikes in the Upper Engadin. These works mark a new chapter in his landscape painting – a genre that had always appealed to him for its supposed untimeliness. Richter’s Engadin landscapes are exemplary of the ambiguity in his painting, oscillating between a seductive transfiguration of nature and a reflection of its alienness.
The photographs Richter brought back from the Upper Engadin not only served as templates for his paintings, but also became canvases for his experiments with oil and lacquer paint. Richter enjoyed accentuating the photographic images with delicate traces of colour, disrupting them with stains and splatters, or using paint and a squeegee to cover them almost entirely. This process allowed him to establish contact between the image and the paint, bringing them closer together or even allowing them to collide. More than fifty of these alluring small-scale works can be seen at the two exhibition venues in St. Moritz. Richter first introduced this new chapter in his oeuvre at Nietzsche-Haus in 1992, in an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, which essentially served as a trial run. Some of the first overpainted photographs appear in the artist’s book ‘Sils’ (1992) that was published on the occasion of the show. The maquette for this publication, designed by Richter himself, is on view at Hauser & Wirth.
For security reasons, neither paintings nor overpainted photographs can be exhibited in the Nietzsche House. Here you can see the 41 photos that Richter took in Sils for the book “December”, a book he collaborated on with the writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge and published with Suhrkamp in 2010. Richter’s photographs of snow-covered fir trees serve as silent companions to Kluge’s texts, which focus on significant historical events.
The show is accompanied by a catalogue published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, with images of the works on display and an essay by Dieter Schwarz. It has been produced in collaboration with the Segantini Museum and Nietzsche-Haus.