Photography and abstract art: crossings among record, fiction and testimony in Gerhard Richter

• Autor(a) principal: Ferreira Cuadros, Lóren Cristine
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: letrônica
• Texto Completo: https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/letronica/article/view/33375
• topic: Gerhard Richter. Photographic records. Testimony. Visual arts.; Artes plásticas; Gerhard Richter; registro fotográfico; testemunho.

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando – a group of prisoners who were forced to get rid of the bodies of other Jews in concentration camps – were able to take four photographs of the horrors that took place at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Recently, said pictures inspired one of the German artist Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings named “Birkenau”. This article intends to defend that, although they do not correspond to the first-hand testimony found in the photographic records, the paintings by Richter cause the spectator to feel as uneasy when exposing them to the brutality of the episode to which they refer. Moreover, in order to elucidate the hypothesis hereby addressed, that is, that art sheds new light on the image converted into historical evidence over time, therefore reinforcing its questioning, other comparisons between famous photographs and works of art based on them are also presented.