Vorhang

Richter painted his first curtain in 1964, and the subject has returned to his practice at intervals ever since. The Vorhang paintings are unusual within the Photo Painting series in a specific way: where most of Richter's photographic subjects – aircraft, cityscapes, portraits, candles – are images of things that exist in the world, the curtain is an image of something that prevents viewing. It hangs across the canvas as it would hang across a window or a stage: blocking rather than showing, placing an obstacle between the viewer and whatever might lie beyond. A painting of a curtain is, in that sense, a painting that declines to be a window.

The digital print of 2012 reproduces one of the later Vorhang works – the palette cool and silver, the folds rendered with the controlled precision of his Photo Painting technique at its most disciplined. The curtain fills everything; there is no edge, no relief, no ground that is not fold. At an edition of 25, this is among the rarest of Richter's curtain prints, and the subject – so central to his sustained thinking about what pictures do and do not disclose – makes it one of the more conceptually weighted works in his printed output.