"عصفور" - Oumaima El Khalil
عصفور - أميمة الخليل
(Oumaima El Khalil - Sparrow)
Latifa Echakhch - For Each Stencil a Revolution
Charlotte Ballesteros and Hubert Marot
Braco Dimitrijevic, “Thin Edge of Conventions II”, 2006.
Betty, Gerhard Richter, 1998
oil in canvas, 40.25” x 28.5”
St. Louis Art Museum
The formal elegance and psychological ambiguity of this painting, which is a portrait of the artist’s daughter, combine to make it one of Gerhard Richter’s most riveting works. Captured in the act of turning away from the viewer, or perhaps looking toward an object in the distance, the young girl’s posture expresses both intimacy and withholding: while her face is averted, the figure’s torso actually leans precipitously toward the viewer. The sharp angle of her pose implies that this condition is only temporary and that the dramatically torqued body will soon relax to face us once again. Betty, like many of Richter’s paintings, incorporates an element of photographic realism, but it also documents the artist’s interest in abstraction; in fact, the dark expanse that preoccupies the girl might be one of Richter’s own monochrome paintings. This painting embodies Richter’s practice of blurring the boundaries between painting and photography.
Rachel Whiteread
THRESHOLD I, 2010
Resin, 78 7/10 × 31 ½ × 3 ½ in
