On Gerhard Richter's Blur Effect. The Ambivalent Character of a Distanced Force

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Art - Photography and Film, grade: 78 % = 1, University of Westminster (Department of Media, Arts and Design), course: Photography Dissertation, language: English, abstract: "The strongest of Richter s effects of withdrawing the work from the viewer s gaze, is the creation of a softening blur as the final touch to all his Photo Paintings. Making the paintings, the artist firstly drafts his subject with a normally sized brush to create a sharp image (Fig.3). Having finished, he would come with a broader brush or a squeegee and blur the still wet oil paint (Fig. 4) to create the photographic effect of an out-of-focus image1. The blur in these paintings is not a trace of movement of the object in the photograph. This blur is an addition to the painting that does not relate to a form of haziness in the specific photographic source image, but to the general idea of vagueness, indecisiveness, anti-definition. Therefore, it mirrors the artist s attitudes towards life in an especially expressive way. The enlargement of the usual distance between what is depicted and the viewer are the basis of this effect. At first on a quite literal level: Richter introduces another layer of depiction in these paintings by creating the depiction of a depiction of an object. This places the object of the painting further away than usual from its maker and us as viewers (Butin, 2010). Secondly, on the level of reception: an image that stays out-of-focus from whichever distance we look at it rejects us, and refuses to communicate. This typical caginess of Richter s paintings, the exclusion of the recipient whom they are made for, is a striking effect in the encounter with these images. The analysis of the antithetic emotional effects of this simple but fascinating painterly technique is the theme of this essay."