Solo Exhibition: Am Abgrund der Bilder

Am Abgrund der Bilder

“I think, in general, there is no picture that you can’t paint,” Gerhard Richter answered in 2001 to the question of whether it was possible to create paintings based on photographs of the industrial extermination of people in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Perhaps there are personal limits, such as one’s own (painterly) inability, but in principle everything is paintable and representable.

In 2014, Richter created his Birkenau cycle, consisting of four paintings, and additionally four digital reproductions of these paintings, printed on aluminum plates, which, each cut into four rectangles, are installed in the entrance area of the Reichstag building in Berlin. The paintings were based on the only four photographs that directly and immediately document the extermination of Jews in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Taken from a gas chamber by a prisoner of the so-called “Sonderkommando” at the risk of death and smuggled out of the camp, they show the burning of corpses and naked women in a forest on their way to the gas chamber of the death camp. Richter painted the four photographs photorealistically in oil on canvas.

Dissatisfied with the result, since in his view he had not succeeded in capturing and depicting the events and suffering of the Holocaust in their entirety in his paintings, he then worked them further with a squeegee and the colors black, gray, green, and red until abstract forms covered the entire canvases and the figurative depictions. “There are just photos that I could just make into bad pictures by painting them. And these four photos are so good that I can only leave them as they are. You can describe them or dedicate a music to them or, if it goes well, dedicate an abstract painting.” Originally called Vier abstrakte Bilder [Four Abstract Paintings], he later changes the title to Birkenau in order to lay a trail to their origin and historical reference that is no longer discernible on the images themselves.

In his work Mögliche und unmögliche Bilder #I [Possible and Impossible Images #I], (2022), Michael Müller deconstructs Richter’s Birkenau cycle. Without seeking a direct comparison between two painters (Richter vs. Müller), i. e., without pursuing Richter’s thesis of individual painterly abilities and personal limits as a condition of the possibility of the paintability of every picture, Müller rather continues Richter’s initial question of whether everything is in principle paintable or showable by using Richter’s aesthetics to investigate what different works of art can achieve. From the fundamental freedom of art, grounded in its aesthetic essence, Müller derives ethical considerations of artistic ways of representation and processes that were left out by Richter, who confines himself only to the immanence of art: While art, Müller argues, can devote itself to anything and take on any subject, paint and show anything, but can it achieve anything? Is it possible to give an empathetic picture of the Holocaust? In the totality of its inhuman, absolute and total power of annihilation, in its urge to destroy even the last trace of its existence?

For his investigation, Müller uncovers the painting layers of Richter’s Birkenau pictures and questions them according to their respective expressiveness: as the lower, later concealed layer, the painterly figurative reproductions of the four photographs of the annihilation process of the European Jews taken from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp—supplemented by the wiping technique typical of Richter, which veils what is depicted and yet allows it to be recognized. The second level is formed by the abstract overpaintings, the streaks and stripes drawn with a squeegee—a technique that allows chance into the painting process and is actually considered unreproducible. Müller, who nevertheless succeeds in reproducing it, shows that even the supposed randomness and arbitrariness are the results of artistic decisions that are reproducible, like the digital prints on aluminum in the Reichstag building, on which Müller has chosen to base his painting in the exhibition, which is also divided into four panels. Installed side by side on the walls of the exhibition space, surrounding the visitors, it is up to them to decide what can be painted and shown at all—what each of the works on view shows in an individual way. Even if Gerhard Richter may have considered his first artistic attempt at a response—the realistic paintings with the photographs of the “Sonderkommando”—to have failed and sought a renewed, more ‘precise’, ‘better’ or ‘more appropriate’ response in the abstract overpaintings, the first attempt is nevertheless also a response in spite of everything. By juxtaposing the various attempts at answers in the exhibition space and allowing them to coexist—may they have failed or not—Müller opens up a space of openness that unfolds in the dialogue of the diverse, always incomplete and never final answers.

For everything is paintable and showable, but there is no image that universally and completely shows the world; rather, every image takes a position and must relate to the world, to what it shows. Even the documentary image, the photographs from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, for all the authenticity of the place and events they show, their indisputable testimony, are not complete, but excerpted, selective, perspectival—and it is precisely through this that they gain their necessity, significance and dignity. The blind spots that can be seen on them and the absent that can be guessed at, which is just not shown, distinguishes their humanity and uniqueness.