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Richter somehow manages to move successfully between two interests generally considered contradictory. Although he can be described as a “classicist”, in terms of his painterly skills and the use of traditional genres, he also makes prolific use of photography—not necessarily to weaken the painting, but rather to explain the difficult relationship between painting and photography. He approaches contemporary themes of perception, representation, meaning and memory without irony. In his figurative paintings and realist landscapes, Richter uses photography, a mechanic memory for recording images, as a source for the creation of a subjectively represented moment. In his abstract paintings, he works the canvas to give it a photographic emulsion, as if the image were a fuzzy or stained Polaroid photo. Richter’s works frequently distort the images to displace the subject and distance it from reality as a way of reminding us that an image, whether painted or photographed, is just an image.
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