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拍品专文
Based on Gerhard Richter’s seminal 1989 painting of the same name, Betty, 1991, is one of twenty-five original prints of one of the artist’s most iconic and popular artworks. The painting of Betty was conceived from a photograph that Richter took of his 11 year old daughter wearing a red-flowery bath robe as she looks back at one of her father’s grey paintings. Betty is the third and last painting that Richter painted of his daughter Bettina, and occupies an important position within the artist’s oeuvre as it provides a contrast to the detached, distance nature of his earlier work. Maintaining an intriguing distance, Betty is at once completely open to the viewer’s gaze yet also elusive and distant; Richter here makes use of the Romantic trope of depicting a figure turning away as means of sparking a desire to see the subject’s face and thereby drawing the viewer into the work.
Though Betty was twenty-one years old at the time of the painting’s creation, Richter chose to depict an image of Betty as a young girl. Part of the image’s allure is the way it captures a transitional moment, from childhood to adulthood, which is as fleeting and unstable, tense and dynamic as the girl’s pose. Whilst Betty is of great personal significance to the artist, the work also touches upon questions regarding the relationship between a younger generation and its elders, an issue Richter was working on at the same time with his series 18 October 1977. In the present work, Richter has taken this method of reproduction one step further by then photographing his painting and reproducing the image as an offset print, effectively blurring the lines between the media and closing the circle of his longstanding exploration into the relationship between painting and photography.
Richter himself declares the photograph as an entirely new work of art. Speaking of this process Richter has said, ‘in the photograph, I take even more focus out of the painted image, which is already a bit out of focus, and make the picture smoother. I also subtract the materiality, the surface of the painting, and it becomes something different’ (G. Richter, quoted in R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting, New York 2002, p. 291). By then adding a frame to give the altered photograph greater distance and object character, he imbues the work with its own reality so that somehow ‘it becomes an independent object’ (G. Richter, quoted in R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting, New York 2002, p. 291). The difference between ‘Betty’ the print and ‘Betty’ the painting is striking; the photograph of Betty assumes a naturalness that is, in fact, deceptive insofar as it is the compound result of removing the signs of painterly materiality through both the use of a brush and subsequently the lens.
Though Betty was twenty-one years old at the time of the painting’s creation, Richter chose to depict an image of Betty as a young girl. Part of the image’s allure is the way it captures a transitional moment, from childhood to adulthood, which is as fleeting and unstable, tense and dynamic as the girl’s pose. Whilst Betty is of great personal significance to the artist, the work also touches upon questions regarding the relationship between a younger generation and its elders, an issue Richter was working on at the same time with his series 18 October 1977. In the present work, Richter has taken this method of reproduction one step further by then photographing his painting and reproducing the image as an offset print, effectively blurring the lines between the media and closing the circle of his longstanding exploration into the relationship between painting and photography.
Richter himself declares the photograph as an entirely new work of art. Speaking of this process Richter has said, ‘in the photograph, I take even more focus out of the painted image, which is already a bit out of focus, and make the picture smoother. I also subtract the materiality, the surface of the painting, and it becomes something different’ (G. Richter, quoted in R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting, New York 2002, p. 291). By then adding a frame to give the altered photograph greater distance and object character, he imbues the work with its own reality so that somehow ‘it becomes an independent object’ (G. Richter, quoted in R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting, New York 2002, p. 291). The difference between ‘Betty’ the print and ‘Betty’ the painting is striking; the photograph of Betty assumes a naturalness that is, in fact, deceptive insofar as it is the compound result of removing the signs of painterly materiality through both the use of a brush and subsequently the lens.