Semesters 1 and 2

Painting, memory, politics. The century of Gerhard Richter by Christian Joschke
Wednesday 16.00-18.00 amphi des loges

This course looks at the relationship between painting and memory and politics. We will choose a specific angle: we will look at six decades, from the 1960s to 2020, through the eyes of Gerhard Richter. The German artist embodied a critical, reflexive vision of modernity that was, in short, ‘at a distance’, and was driven by a questioning of painting through photography. Through this confrontation with what Walter Benjamin called ‘the era of the technical reproducibility of the work of art’, Richter never ceased to raise the question of memory and politics: memory is that of the war and the Holocaust at the time of the ‘trial of the fathers’, and politics is subtly articulated, without taking polemical positions, through often deliberately untimely references to recent history.

There is no doubt that this thinking is still relevant today. We need only look at the irruption of digital culture in artistic production in the twenty-first century. The course will not be strictly monographic. Rather than working on Richter, we will work with Richter. His work will provide us with a perspective on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based on his work, we will study a rich history, from Sigmar Polke to Wolfgang Tillmans, from Andy Warhol to Ellsworth Kelly, from Isa Genzken to Rosemarie Trockel and Catharina Grosse, and including writers and philosophers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Ingeborg Bachmann and Alexander Kluge.

Course timetable Wednesdays from 4pm to 6pm

1st semester: 30 September to 21 December 2024
2nd semester: 20 January to 12 April 2025

Photo credit: Ali Arkady