Thanks to Karen from Stuttgart, (tech-writer, music-lover, bookworm, art-appreciator, DVD-watcher, comp-addict, stumbler, European Citizen), I stumbled across this illuminating little piece when I looked for info on Gerhard Richter's work to further a discussion I was having with someone yesterday about the modern windows in the Cologne Cathedral - whilst standing in the church in Beaumont -- and admiring their modest stained glass windows. A little out of the ordinary posts in this blog? Except nothing is quite out of the ordinary when you live in this fascinating part of the world and amongst a population as diverse and cosmopolitan as we have here. As many different individuals, as many different experiences, views, opinions and interests. Most certainly never a dull moment!...So -- back to Gerhard Richter and his controversial window in the Cologne Cathedral : Blood-spurting martyrs, biblical parables, ascendant doves -- most church windows feature the same preachy images that have awed parishioners for centuries. But a new stained-glass window in Germany's Cologne Cathedral, completed only two years ago, evokes technology and science, not religion and the divine.
Contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter designed the 65-foot-tall work to replace the original, destroyed by bombs in World War II. As a starting point, he used his own 1974 painting 4096 Colours.
To create that piece -- a 64-by-64 grid of squares -- Richter devised a mathematical formula to systematically mix permutations of the three primary colours and gray. Funny coincidence: 4,096 is also the number of "Web-smart" colours that display consistently on older computer screens, a limitation some Web designers still take into account. (Today's monitors, of course, can handle pretty much any hue.)
The Cologne window is made of 11,500 four-inch " pixels" cut from original antique glass in a total of 72 colours. Why not 4,096? Turns out there are stained glass-smart colours, too. Some hues in Richter's initial design were either historically inaccurate or too pale -- they would have outshone the squares around them. So the artist modified his palette to include only colours with a suitably archaic cast. Because it's fine for a church window to look like it's been designed by a computer, as long as it's a computer with a Gothic sensibility.
Gerhard Richter has had a phenomenal career and is the only living artist represented in all the major galleries and art museums in the world.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 to a middle class family. Like many Germans of his generation, his relatives were involved in the Nazi movement; his mother's brother, Uncle Rudi died a young Nazi officer, while Richter's mentally disabled aunt was imprisoned in a Hitler euthanasia camp. Rigorous ideology and death have haunted Richter since he was just a child, perhaps causing his strong dislike for ideology of any kind and underpinning the attraction that nature, as an indiscriminate force, holds for him.
Support from his mother encouraged him to become an artist during his mid-teens and he embarked on a classical education at the Dresden Art Academy in Communist East Germany. Years later and a few months prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall, he and his wife fled with only a suitcase to Düsseldorf in West Germany. From 1961 to 1964, Richter studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Gotz. During the early sixties Richter met and began to work with artists such as Sigmar Polke, Konrad Fischer-Lueg and Georg Baselitz. Their work, and Richter's in particular, began to have an impact in Germany, and eventually international art circles. Richter's beliefs are credited with refreshing art and rejuvenating painting as a medium during a period when many artists chose performance and ready-made media. Together with Polke and Fischer-Lueg, Richter formed a group called the Capitalist Realists. The Capitalist Realists were satirical, often deriving subject matter from print media. Richter began to see art as something that had to be separated from art history; he believed that paintings should focus on the image rather than the reference, the visual rather than the statement. He wanted to find a new way of painting that would not be constricting. Richter emerged from the group to become one of the most sought after contemporary artists in the world. His work is regularly sold at auction, sometimes for millions.
Richter, a resident of the catheral city since the early 1980s, was made an honorary citizen of Cologne in April 2007.
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