Gerhard Richter Painting

Comments (0) By Aaron Hillis Wednesday, Mar 14 2012

Countless documentaries have feebly attempted to probe and illuminate the creative process (the phrase "dancing about architecture" springs to mind), and even Dresden-born visual artist Gerhard Richter—an 80-year-old master of many brush styles and ideas, from photorealistic portraiture to abstract expressionism—believes his work can't be described with words. "Painting is another form of thinking," the soft-spoken but no-bullshit iconoclast tells director Corinna Belz, whose magnificent and evocative observances of him laboring in his studio come as close as cinema gets to tracking the impulses and paradoxes of a gifted imagination. Alone with his enormous canvases, Richter studies his own vibrant-hued strokes and patterns, disappoints himself in the moment, then destroys and creates anew with a giant squeegee pulled across the would-be work of art, aided by Belz's deeply satisfying attention to the tactile sounds of paint slapped on or scraped away. New and vintage interviews with curators, historians, and collaborators help contextualize Richter's five-decade career, but who even needs talking heads when you have panning shots of exhibition-layout thumbnails—rich works of art on their own at 1:50 scale. Gerhard Richter Painting artfully and convincingly immerses us into the world of one of the greatest, painting.