Berlin museum presents 100 works by artist Gerhard Richter

By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER
Associated Press

BERLIN (AP) — A new show of works by one of Germany’s most famous living artists, Gerhard Richter, has opened at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie museum. “Gerhard Richter. 100 Works for Berlin” shows for the first time the long-term loan from the artist’s foundation. At the center of the exhibition that opened Friday is Richter’s 2014 series “Birkenau,” the result of the artist’s decades-long engagement with Germany’s Nazi past and the Holocaust. The four large canvases of the Birkenau series are abstract paintings with many gray and black surfaces, but also some red and green. Richter’s process of abstraction was based on his conviction that he couldn’t do justice to the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust with direct depiction.