Cinematic Painting: Time and Motion in Gerhard Richter’s Portraits

Frances Guerin is academic, writer and art critic and from May to July 2023, she will be in residence at TU Dresden as Senior Fellow. At Dresden she will complete her monograph on Gerhard Richter’s portraits and participate in a number of events designed to engage students, scholars and members of the Dresden community.

In this lecture she examines Gerhard Richter’s use of the cinematic in a series of eleven selfportraits labelled one per day between 15 January 1990 and 26 January 1990. She demonstrates that Richter uses strategies associated with the cinema to challenge the limits of painting even when he uses the medium of photography.