Benjamin Buchloh is a German art historian whose work critically examines modern art. He is known for his deep engagement with the theoretical underpinnings and historical contexts of artistic movements. His analyses often probe the social and political dimensions embedded within artworks, offering a nuanced perspective on their creation and reception.
The four large-format pictures, which Gerhard Richter first called “abstract pictures,” but later titled Birkenau, were produced in 2014. They were based on photos taken at an execution. An essay by art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh explains the creation of these pictures. Richter has also made archive photos, documenting phases of the painting process, available for use in this book.
Four key historians present a comprehensive history of art from the past century, documenting through 100 essays presented in a year-by-year format key events that contributed to the changing of artistic traditions and the invention of new practices and forms, in a volume complemented by more than 600 reproductions of some of the century's most important works.
This collection features influential essays by art critic and historian Benjamin Buchloh, reflecting on pivotal artistic transitions in the twentieth century. Spanning three decades, the essays explore formal and historical paradigms, examining how artistic forms evolved alongside significant historical contexts. Buchloh's rigorous analysis has profoundly shaped contemporary art theory and practice, making this volume an essential resource for understanding the complexities of modern art history.
A pioneer of Southern California underground culture, Raymond Pettibon (*1957 in Tucson) has blurred the boundaries of “high” and “low“ since the late seventies—from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Rich in detail, his obsessively worked drawings draw freely on myriad sources spanning the cultural spectrum. The resulting highly poetic constructions function as acute and authentic reflections of contemporary society. Throughout the years, his subjects have included political figures and historical events, with particular intensity since the events of September 11, 2001. The volume features images of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, Bush senior and junior, the Kennedys, Adolf Hitler, Barack Obama, and Osama bin Laden alongside scenes from the Vietnam War, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, and protest movements.
Painting—its principles, boundaries, and possibilities—is the central theme of the extensive body of work by Gerhard Richter (*1932 in Dresden), an oeuvre has been characterized by stylistic contrasts since the very beginning. This elegant volume of color plates featuring profound essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Beate Söntgen, and Gregor Stemmrich focuses on the artist’s abstract paintings, which have comprised a dominant portion of his collective works since the eighties. The book does not trace the development of form and content in the paintings, but concentrates instead on the paintings that thematically comprise a homogenous body of work. It is based on the assertion that Richter’s abstract paintings are the results of various painterly processes that are not guided in a particular direction by a content-related precept. The featured paintings were produced between 1986 and 2006 and place emphasis on large-format paintings characterized by a prodigious painterly density. (German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-2248-3) Exhibition schedule: Museum Ludwig, Cologne, October 18, 2008–February 1, 2009 · Haus der Kunst, Munich, February 27–May 17, 2009 · Further venues planned
The Marian Goodman Gallery, New York presents a major show of works made by Richter from 2005 to the present, including an important new cycle of paintings titled Sindbad, 2008. Also included are individual paintings presenting medium to large format abstractions, and a new group of large scale near-monochrome paintings whose underlying chromatic structures are layered by translucent veils of white paint. In his essay, art historian Benjamin Buchloh traces the historical and aesthetic framework of Richter's abstract paintings and considers the artist's recent white non-representational works within the larger context of a postwar trajectory of reductivist painting in the US and Europe. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at The Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 7th November 2009 – 9th January 2010. English and German text.
This publication brings together four texts which analyze Gerhard Richter's monumental project Atlas, an assemblage of photographs that he has collected since 1962. Atlas, which at present comprises more than 5,000 images -- ranging from political portraits to landscapes and from found photojournalistic pictures to photographs taken by the artist himself -- constitutes an ordered collection of personal visual memories from which Richter draws the themes and motifs for his ongoing exploration of the possibilities of painting. Buchloh examines Atlas as a mnemonic device, comparing Richter's assemblage to Aby Warburg's 1927 monumental project on collective memory; Chevrier distinguishes European and American uses of photography and art and positions Richter's work in contrast to that of the Photorealists and American Pop artists; Zweite discusses Atlas as a response to the tension between semantics and semiotics in Modernism; and Rochlitz analyses the complex relationship between photography and painting in contemporary art with specific reference to Richter's works Ema and Betty.