Gerhard Richter

Private Collection

Hubertus Butin, Gerhard Richter: Editionen 1965-2013, Ostfildern 2014, p. 330, no.158, illustration of another example in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly less saturated in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Depicting one of the most important subjects of Gerhard Richter’s celebrated oeuvre, the artist’s 10-year old daughter, the Babette print edition is based on one of the highly acclaimed photorealist paintings that was made after a series of photographs taken in 1977. Not only is the subject-matter of these paintings highly personal for Richter, but also extremely politically charged: taken at the same time as the photographs of the Baader Meinhof group that Richter famously painted in 1988 alongside a new portrait of his daughter, these seemingly divergent themes are closely connected. As Dietmar Elger observed: “In the end Betty and the Meinhof portrait must be seen as complementary (...) Betty, seen alongside Youth Portrait, reinforces the tragic irony of how easy it is to descend from a protected bourgeois existence into an irrational, ideological worldview” (Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2002, p. 308).

In Richter’s idiosyncratic fashion, the original painting abolishes the distinction between photograph and painting, since the painting effectively takes on the appearance of a blurred photograph. Gerhard Richter’s distinctively post-modern approach towards images is taken a step further in the printed edition, in which the notion of the original is even farther removed: we are here looking at a photograph of a painting of a photograph of reality. Complicating matters even more, the meticulously rendered inkjet print shows all the typical surface irregularities of paintings, including the brushstrokes, thus making the photograph closely resemble a painting. In content as well as technique, Babette is therefore an outstanding example of Gerhard Richter’s influential and multi-disciplinary practice.