Here is the first comprehensive exhibition of German master Gerhard Richter in Hungary

Opening on 27 August, the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest is hosting an exhibition of works by the world-renowned contemporary German master Gerhard Richter, who turns ninety next year. Entitled Gerhard Richter. Truth in Semblance, the show is the artist’s first comprehensive exhibition in Hungary, featuring almost eighty works from Hungarian and international public and private collections, and representing every period of his career. Among the eighty works on display are four larger, multi-part series, making it a total of around two hundred works awaiting visitors. The exhibits range from his iconic photo-paintings of the 1960s, through the colour-rich abstract pieces for which he is perhaps best known, to his most recent, intimate pencil drawings. The latter were produced after his announcement in the autumn of 2020 that he had finished his painted oeuvre – a fact that lends the Budapest show particular significance.

Gerhard Richter. Truth in Semblance is the fourth in the series of exhibitions organised by the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest to showcase the trends in German art since 1945. The series began in 2012 with Material Becomes Picture, presenting the works of Günther Uecker, and continued in 2014 with an exhibition of works by Jörg Immendorff, entitled Long Live Painting!. The third artist included in the series was Georg Baselitz, whose show Preview with Review was on in 2017. Our aim is to present to the public the diverse art phenomena and defining trends in Germany since World War II by focusing on the most emblematic and internationally celebrated figures of the German art scene.

Gerhard Richter’s art is especially interesting to Hungarians for a number of reasons: we are tied by our complex and volatile common past, and by the circumstances of Central Europe, where Richter, who started out as an artist in East Germany, spent the first thirty years of his life.

Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, emigrated from East Germany in 1961, and currently resides in Cologne. For the Budapest exhibition he has produced a special series of drawings, which are now being displayed to the public for the first time.

For close to sixty years, a central role in Gerhard Richter’s life’s work, which he began (anew) in West Germany in 1961, has been played by the continuous erosion and blurring of the border between reality and illusion, by the expansion of boundaries, and by questions related to the representability of different “realities” and the capturing – and instantaneous dissipation – of the given moment. As Richter has, throughout his life, had direct experience of several different political, social, economic and cultural systems, his relationship with reality (or realities) can best be apprehended in terms of doubts, scepticism, transience, evanescence and fragility. The essence and power of his art emanate from his propensity to analyse and to question everything, and from his ensuing compulsion to keep moving forward, inexorably.