Gerhard Richard at The MET Breuer

Gerhard Richard’s exhibition at The MET Breuer is a compilation of his paintings showing his diverse style and execution. Gerhard Richard was born in time to witness the Second World War, and the economic and personal loss he suffered from it is greatly reflected in his work of arts. In his painting “Tante Marianne”, he depicted a young woman holding a kid between her laps but had it so textured it’s blurred out. This gives audiences a dream-like feeling, as if this Aunt Marianne figure is someone who we’d lost, and could only faintly see again in our dreams.

This blurred out effect has been used in almost all his portrait drawings, and the figures feel farther and farther away into the fog further down his age. With no experience of losing someone I love, Gerhard Richard’s painting explained to me the pain of still loving someone but never being able to see them again, even slowly losing the ability to recollect everything about them as time passes. The exhibition also included the artist’s abstract arts, mostly done with earth tone colors, with the paint aggressively splashed on and scraped off. They might be the artist’s document of the bloodshed he witnessed on the battlefield, and how it scraped his soul away.

Amongst all the grieving work that he has on view, one abstract piece, July,  stands out from the rest. It to me is a depiction of bamboos, which symbolizes renewal and growth, growing out of the cartridge case at the lower half of the canvas, reaching for the clear blue sky above the red clouds, giving a sense of healing and hope. This group of work made me feel all aspects of war - the violence, the agony, and the hope in human nature it can’t kill.