25T15 Art4All Thursday: “Birkenau” by G. Richter

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E14, B09.

“Can something truly awful be depicted in a meaningful way?”

Art4All Thursday means the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery, NNG) is entirely free to the public from 4pm to 8pm. Residents and visitors in the masses stream into the gallery, because regular admission is between 16 and 20€.

Gerhard Richter is one of the featured artists on display at the NNG. Since the 1970s, the German artist has explored the limits of the painting process and physicality, but he like many of their generation has also challenged the ideas of producing meaning in German art in a post-Holocaust world. I saw some of his work this past winter at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, but here on display in Berlin, his 2014-2019 work called “Birkenau” is abstract, challenging, poignant, and provocative.

“Abstract images are fictional models because they visualise a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can infer.” (Gerhard Richter)

That’s another mirror at the end.
A forbidden image taken by a prisoner, attributed to Alberto Errera: Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944.
“Grauer Spiegel” / Grey mirror, by G. Richter, 2019, 4 parts.
“Birkenau”, by G. Richter, 2014, 4 parts.
The physical reflection invites the impossible, a (self-) examination asked by the artist of the viewer to consider the moral depths into which we will sink; whether survival welcomes or allows creative expression, and whether we still have it in ourselves to truly engage with the history of very difficult questions.
1 of the 4 parts. The abstraction is what keeps things “level”; see why below.
Neue Nationalgalerie.

I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 22 May 2025. I received neither request nor compensation for this content. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.

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