III. WALD 2008

Gerhard Richter made this photograph titled III. WALD in 2008 and in it, Richter seems to take a classically romantic subject, the forest, and then obscures it, smudging our reading, and muddying our interpretation. There's a tension here between revealing and concealing. The bottom and the top edges are clear enough, we can see trees and branches and feel the light. But then this big, dark, blurry smudge dominates the center. It's so opaque, it's like looking into a void. What was there and what is Richter doing to it? The surface has a photographic quality, a slickness, yet the heavy-handed gesture of obscuration is so physical, so painterly. You can almost feel the pressure of the hand that wiped the surface. For me this act of obscuring is like a metaphor for memory and how things disappear from it. Richter often deals with history, and the unreliability of images. This piece feels like a meditation on that theme, echoing the work of someone like Sigmar Polke, who also embraced chance and ambiguity in his work.