Gerhard Richter Painting

German artist Gerhard Richter has spent over half a century experimenting with a tremendous range of techniques and ideas, addressing historical crises, and mass media representation alongside explorations of chance procedures. Infamously media-shy, he agreed to appear on camera for the first time in 15 years for a 2007 short film by Corinna Belz. Her follow-up, Gerhard Richter Painting, is a thrilling document of Richter's creative process, juxtaposed with intimate conversations (with his critics, his collaborators, and his American gallerist Marian Goodman) and rare archival material. From our fly-on-the-wall perspective, we watch the 79-year-old create a series of large-scale abstract canvases, using fat brushes and a massive squeegee to apply and then scrape off layer after layer of brightly colored paint. This mesmerizing footage of a highly charged process of creation and destruction turns Belz's portrait of an artist into a work of art itself.