For the first time, an exhibition at three locations in St. Moritz and Sils will focus on Richter's close relationship with the Upper Engadin village. Over seventy works from museums and private collections - paintings, overpainted photographs, drawings and an object - illustrate the fascination that this landscape exerted on him.
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) is one of the leading and most famous contemporary artists. His works are in international collections and have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Europe and the USA. Richter came to Sils for a vacation in 1989, and for over 25 years he regularly spent summer and winter vacations in the Upper Engadin village.
The work that links the three exhibition venues, as it can be seen at each of them, is a steel sphere that Richter had made as an edition and presented in 1992 in an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Nietzsche House. Each sphere bears the name of a mountain in the Upper Engadin. The matt, shiny, incomprehensible sphere, which slightly reflects everything around it, is a symbol of the sublime and at the same time repellent appearance of nature, which is particularly impressive in the mountains.
Segantini Museum St. Moritz, Exhibition Gerhard Richter - Engadin © Gerhard Richter 2023
The Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth exhibit pictures that Richter painted from photographs he took on hikes in the Upper Engadine. With these pictures, he opened a new chapter in his landscape painting, which had always attracted him as a supposedly outmoded genre. Richter's landscapes with Engadin motifs are exemplary of the ambiguity of his painting; they move between the seductive transfiguration of nature and the experience of its strangeness. Particularly impressive is the painting "Waterfall" (1997) from the Kunst Museum Winterthur, in which Richter's examination of 19th century painting, from Romanticism to Realism, becomes visible. Richter later painted over some of the motifs, images of Piz Materdell and Lake Sils, transforming them into abstract paintings whose melancholy mood responds to the impressions of the landscape.
December 16, 2023 to April 13, 2024
