In March, New York’s David Zwirner opened its first solo exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s work since the painter’s defection to the megagallery from Marian Goodman, his gallerist of thirty-seven years. The show featured fourteen of his last paintings, completed in 2016 and 2017, made before the artist, now ninety-one, declared his retirement from painting. It also contained seventy-six drawings—the products of the practice that replaced the physically arduous process of painting for Richter—and a single glass-and-steel sculpture. If one were looking for a kind of retrospective, or a coda and summation of the artist’s career, this exhibition might have disappointed: It was, in many ways, just another Richter show, which is to say it was still quite remarkable. Often a painter’s final works will show their style stripped down to its bare essentials, a move into monochrome, or another statement of completion, but Richter’s last abstractions, although they show subtle developments and variations from his previous work, don’t boldly declare, These are they. This is it. I have figured it out. Such a flourish would feel unnatural for a painter who has made the public performance of skepticism and self-doubt his métier. This show felt more like a continuation than a conclusion of his practice. Still, it’s possible to find, in this simultaneous refusal and acceptance of the idea of a final painting, his legacy as an artist.
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