Birkenau . 2014
+ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Richter is interested in what pictures mean—not the spectacle of the image itself. His Birkenau series was based on four photographs smuggled from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp, in 1944. In 2014 Richter revisited the horrific images, first sketching them out on individual canvases, but then gradually painting them over to produce heavily disturbed, ruptured surfaces. This veiling holds in tension the complex relationship of history and memory, with the forces of destruction and reconstruction, and with abstraction and representation.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
_
