Gerhard Richter: Panorama
Rowena Loverance has been looking at the work of a German master
Halfway round the Gerhard Richter exhibition at Tate Modern, I stop in my tracks and smile broadly at the wall. On it hang three massive paintings of an overcast sky, each flecked by a pale puff of cloud. Is this, I wonder, what the James Turrell skyscape in the refurbished Large Meeting House at Friends House might look like? The eye, with its instinct to consolidate and clarify, darts from painting to painting – is the artist replicating timelapse photographs or are the images actually identical? Does it matter? Later, I find that the heavy sky, somewhere between dark turquoise and bottle green, has left more of a presence in the mind’s eye than the insubstantial cloud.
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