게르하르드 리히터의 트라우마적 역사의 재현

Abstract

Gerhard Richter, one of the most important postmodern artists, has constantly tried to convey the despair of the Nazi Era and the terrifying memory of its commitment to the Holocaust in his painting. The history of Germany in the Nazi era revealed the ultimate potential of the evil that is embedded in our human beings, which has also wounded the Germans with deep trauma. Richter was particularly concerned with the dilemma between the necessity of remembering the darkest days during the Nazi Era and the impossibility of representing the traumatic memories. He then came up with his own way of resolving the dilemma in either figurative painting on one hand or in abstract painting on the other. As for the figurative painting, he tried to replicate photos of his relatives as a way of excluding any subjective views and trying to persist with the eyes of an observer that has a sense of distance in order to present only mere facts. Furthermore, he applied the method of blurring the outline of the objects in the picture like an image of a photograph that doesn’t have any focus, suggesting the impossibility of describing the Truth(Wirklichkeit) of a certain historical incident in a fixed or single interpretation but rather leaving room for a diversity of different perspectives. He rather chose ordinary pictures of his intimate acquaintances such as the German officer Rudi, his uncle, instead of the disastrous sight of the Holocaust as his painting objects, which drives the spectators to reflect the ‘the banality of Evil’ that Hannah Arendt had mentioned and have become a major issue at that time. Apart from the pictorial paintings, Richter has recently come out with a series of four abstract paintings, titled Birkenau, the name of the concentration camp of the Nazi Era. The series is based on the four photos of the horrifying scene in the concentration camp, in which he used his scrape technique giving up his previous way of photo painting. These paintings, in which the tone of grey is particularly dominant, form the Palimpsest structure as the scraping method oozes out the color that was hidden beneath the surface. The spectator, who is aware of the existence of Birkenau, will be able to project one’s traumatized memory and image of the holocaust and the concentration camp from its various forms and colors created by the Scraping technique. This way of projecting specific interpretations from a given optical element of the painting can be compared similarly with the Allegory work. This Projection doesn’t concur in a specific singular solution, but varies continuously, according to the psychological state of the spectators, so that the signified of the given optical element can remain open. For Richter, this is the only way to depict the traumatic image of the Holocaust in his paintings.