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A Special Interview with Dr. Ortrud Westheider, Curator of an Exclusive Exhibition at the Bucerius Art Forum

Dr. Westheider, can you describe the significance of this new exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s artwork?

First of all, Gerhard Richter is among the most important artists in the 21st century; he is especially well-respected in the United States.

The significance of the exhibition in the Bucerius Art Forum is threefold:
For the first time, Richter’s work has been assembled in themes which, when looked at as a collection, build an image of an era. The original German magazine images that inspired Richter are assembled next to his work, also a first. And for the third time ever, Richter’s “October 18, 1977” series of paintings is being exhibited in Germany.

What works will make up the Hamburg exhibition?

The exhibition includes many of Gerhard Richter’s well-known works and will provide a unique perspective on the 1960s. Richter picked three young people in a boat as the lead image for this exhibition, an image reflecting on the new freedom and wealth in Germany two decades after the Second World War. The exhibition also includes three pieces inspired by the Kennedy assassination, including “Woman with an Umbrella,” which features a disguised image of Jackie Kennedy. And we have 15 pieces from the “October 18, 1977” series, which usually is part of the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and rarely shown elsewhere.

Can you give us some background on the pieces you obtained for this exhibition from the Museum of Modern Art in New York?

The “October 18, 1977” series in paint reflects the Baader Meinhof terrorist attacks in Germany in 1977. Gerhard Richter did this work a decade later, reviewing the photo archives of two Hamburg-based news magazines.
The significance of Gerhard Richter’s work is that a contemporary artist put himelf in the shoes of an historian, portraying key events of the time in paint.
The series has been part of the MoMA permanent exhibition since 1995. Following the 9/11 attacks, it was at the center of a debate about the appropriateness of terrorist depiction in art. Since then, the pieces are not shown as a series, but as individual works.

Where can we learn more about the exhibition in Hamburg?

We currently are working on an English edition of our catalogue and will inform the American Friends of Bucerius once this is available. There was an interesting short story by Don Delillo in a 2002 issue of the New Yorker inspired by the Baader Meinhof series in the MoMA. The abstract is free. You also can visit our website, where we just added a video.