Art Students Visit the Tate Modern

For the A2 Art Trip we went to see Gerhard Richer’s exhibition at The Tate Modern. We were fascinated as students to see an exhibition of such variety accomplished by one artist. The work he produced concerning the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001 was striking and his unusual approach to such a sensitive topic was almost a paradox as he managed to transform the horrific events of 9/11 into a work of art. He achieved this by painting the collapse of the burning towers but then it seems as if the magnitude of the events couldn’t be expressed through a replication and so he smeared the paint when it was wet to distort the image and blur the event. Richer’s photopainting allowed him to expand upon his ideas of vision and perception through taking photos and then painting from them, inspiring old and young artists, students or even just visitors of the gallery.