Lot 648 D

In his essay "Unbekannte Fotoarbeiten von Gerhard Richter", Hubertus Butin describes an example very similar to the present work, shot by the artist in 1971 with a delayed-action shutter release in the flat he lived in at the time in Düsseldorf/Luegallee: “While the silhouette of his bare shoulders is easily perceptible, the glass door in the background is depicted quite out of focus. In the picture, Richter turns his head to the right in a swift movement so that his face appears heavily blurred. […] Most notably, the face may no longer be used in a psychologising and identity-establishing manner as a 'stage for emotions'. The blurred focus that is familiar to us mainly from his photo painting superimposes Richter's face like a veil in this photograph and thus removes the optical and cognitive access to the motif. In his pictures, the blurred focus as a specific method of presentation can generally be understood as a paradigm of a fundamental doubt in cognition” (cited by Hubertus Butin, in: Stefan Gronert (ed.), Gerhard Richter. Portraits, exhib.cat. Museumsberg Flensburg, Ostfildern 2006, p. 216).