Florence Hotel Atlantic Palace

Florence Hotel Machiavelli

Florence Hotel Paris

Tuscany-coast Residence I Macchiaioli

From February 20th up to April 25th, 2010 the CCCS: Contemporary Culture in Florence will house the exhibition Gerard Richter and the disappearance of the image in contemporary art.

Staged in collaboration with the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the exhibition presents the work of Gerhard Richter, one of the best-known and most sought-after living painters, in dialogue with works by seven international contemporary artists, who all share Richter’s profound distrust of the image as a guarantee of truth.

Following on from Manipulating Reality, which explored the relationship between reality and representation in the medium of photography, this exhibition focus on the disappearance of the image. Gerhard Richter, one of the pioneers in depicting the dissolution of both the motif and the medium, paints over original pictures or uses a blurred painting technique. He deliberately selects trivial or random motifs as the starting point for his paintings. Well aware of the power of images, Richter strives to break or at least question their authority by making his pictures merge or disappear. He plays with reality and appearance and converts figurative images into abstract ones by focusing, for example, on fragmentary details. He pioneered the use of existing images as the basis of his paintings, primarily as a means of transferring the characteristics of one medium to another, and for placing different genres on an equal footing. Through his entire body of work, Richter addresses the difference between subjective perception and the objective experience of reality in which the artist can only offer possible approaches to address the difficult relationship between object and its representation.

The CCCS has invited seven contemporary artists who also use the dissolution of the image to engage in a dialogue with Richter’s work. To maintain their own artistic identity the works of each artist will be presented in its own space. Xie Nanxing (China, 1970) uses video and photography as intermediate media for his reflections on painting and the human condition; Lorenzo Banci (IT, 1974) investigates the boundaries between representation and abstraction by painting dissolving shapes in which mere light is the object; while Scott Short’s (USA, 1964) conceptual work is based on photocopying a blank sheet of paper hundreds of times until incidental marks create an accidental image which then becomes a painting. Roger Hiorns (UK, 1975), one of the four artists shortlisted for the 2009 Turner Prize, works with chemical components and choreographs planned incidents to create his sculptural work. Marc Breslin (USA, 1983) uses the pictorial surface like a palimpsest, scratching signs and graffiti into the many layers of paint, thus creating a metaphor for mental processes, memory and oblivion. Wolfgang Tillmans (DE, 1968) treats the photographic paper as canvas. He started by representing everyday subjects and from there he went further into abstraction, following the logic of the medium itself. Antony Gormley (UK, 1950) will produce a site-specific installation for the exhibition, that further develops his research for a new social art where the interplay between abstraction and figuration is the result of a process of dissolution of the human figure.

Meanwhile Richter remains true to the medium of painting, yet questions its possibilities, the other seven artists take as their theme the absence (and sometimes impossibility) of making a clear statement by means of a picture today.

Opening hours
Tuesday - Sunday 10.00 am - 8.00 pm
Special free entrance: Thursday 6.00 pm - 11.00 pm
Monday closed
Last admission to the exhibition 1 hour before closing