Fuji 7 1996

Gerhard Richter made this painting, Fuji 7, with oils, and, well, whatever else he could find to push the paint around! It's all about the process. The surface has this incredible blend of textures, from smooth, translucent veils to these chunky, almost violent streaks of red. Look at how the colors drip and bleed into each other, like memories fading or emotions colliding. There’s a section at the top right where the red paint looks like it was dragged down with a squeegee, leaving these raw, jagged edges. That gesture, that act of dragging, it speaks to something beyond representation. It's like Richter is showing us the guts of painting, the push and pull, the messiness of making. You know, sometimes I think of Richter as a kind of distant cousin to someone like Francis Bacon, both wrestling with the materiality of paint to get at something deeply human, even if it's unsettling.