Elisabeth エリザベート

Over the more than thirty years of his active career, Richter has produced works in many styles, including portraits that look like black-and-white photographs, landscapes with pale colors, and Expressionistic abstract paintings, but his clever brushwork and his pursuit of the crucial elements in two-dimensional art have never changed. It is impossible to make a work of his to represent his whole art, but this work, "Elisabeth", is from the 1960s and a valuable example that shows his art at its starting point. In this period, Richter produced paintings after portrait photographs, and created illusionistic and paradoxical images very different from the photographs by adding various visual tricks, for instance making the background more clearly focused than the figure in the center or blurring an object that is standing still. This particular work looks like a cutout from a page of a popular magazine, only enlarged many times. The woman in swimsuit presented larger than life size accompanied by large letters gives the painting an overwhelming presence and makes it take on an atmosphere very different from that of a photograph or a page from a magazine.
The caption for the photograph, in German, reads: "Bathing cools the hot blood. "Elisabeth" from Vienna loved the romance of the campground."