Gerhard Richter-Ausstellung im Nietzsche-Haus

Gerhard Richter (born 1932) is one of the leading and most famous artists of our time; his works are in international collections and have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Europe and the USA. In 1989, Richter came to Sils for a holiday. For the next 25 years, he regularly stayed there for summer or winter holidays.

For the first time, this exhibition, which will be shown at three locations in St. Moritz and Sils, focuses on Richter's close relationship to this landscape. More than seventy works from museums and private collections – paintings, overpainted photographs, drawings and one object – illustrate the fascination that the Upper Engadine exerted on him. The Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth exhibit paintings that Richter painted based on photos he took during hikes in the Upper Engadine. With these paintings, he opened a new chapter in his landscape painting, which had always attracted him as a supposedly outdated genre. Richter's landscapes with Engadine motifs exemplify the ambiguity of his painting; they move between the seductive transfiguration of nature and the experience of its strangeness.

The photos that Richter brought home from the Upper Engadine did not serve him solely as models for his paintings. He used many of them to work on them with oil paint or varnish paint. Richter was tempted to accentuate the photographic image with fine traces of paint, to disturb it with spots and blotches, or to cover it almost entirely with paint with a squeegee, in order to bring image and color matter into contact, to bring them closer together or to let them collide. More than fifty of these attractive small-format works can be seen at the two exhibition venues in St. Moritz. Richter presented this new chapter in his oeuvre for the first time in 1992 in an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Nietzsche House, which actually served as a test run for him. Some of the first overpainted photos were reproduced for the occasion in the artist's book "Sils" (1992).

For the first time, the 39 photos that Richter took in Sils for the book "December", which he published with Suhrkamp in 2010 together with the author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, are exhibited in the Nietzsche House. The snow-covered fir trees that Richter photographed are silent companions to Kluge's texts, which are dedicated to formative historical events. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with illustrations of the exhibited works and a text by the exhibition curator, Dr. Dieter Schwarz. In 1999 and 2014, the former director of the Kunst Museum Winterthur curated exhibitions by Gerhard Richter for this museum; he is the author of the catalogue raisonné of Gerhard Richter's drawings and has written numerous texts about Richter for catalogues and books.

The vernissage will take place on December 28 at 5 p.m. in the Hotel Edelweiss - (next to the Nietzsche House). Curator Dieter Schwarz will introduce the exhibition, followed by an aperitif. Opening of the special exhibition "Gerhard Richter: Engadin" at the Nietzsche House