The power and pleasure of Gerhard Richter’s work lies in its limitlessness, its diversity, its insidiousness, its reliance on internal compulsions and intelligence. Contradictory, contradictory, incongruous: Richter moves from one style of work to another in the exhibition that fills two floors of David Zwirner in London. This could almost be a group exhibition rather than a work by a single artist. Richter won’t be left stranded, and even as he approaches his 92nd birthday next month, he still wants to surprise himself.
As usual, Richter built a scale model of the gallery in his studio and planned the show in minute detail. The earliest study here was conducted in 2010, and the latest was conducted in August last year. Richter leads us first in one direction, then in another. Heavily studied and etched abstraction gives way to a highly reflective glass surface that echoes the room. But behind the glass is a reproduction of one of Richter’s skull paintings; skull turned sideways and lost in one’s own reflection, with other works behind us. Another small mirrored exterior reveals impenetrable gray beneath a surface marked by faint horizontal and vertical line, while upstairs a larger, polished mirror opens up a virtual space beyond our reflections. Here I am, but where am I?
You look at some Richters, you look at others. Some invite very close scrutiny, while others toss you into a bark-red storm of ruins and scrapes. Twisted coagulations and magma-like arrested flows of colored lacquer trapped in an aluminum surface behind glass frames have an almost gemstone-like quality, geological and liquid, intentional but unstable. Something is stirring here, a whole world is awash with geological weather systems. With its fragmented layers and scrapes, it feels like a deep dive beneath the surface of one of his squeegee-and-paste abstractions. It is difficult to see exactly how these small works were made. The technique seems to have something to do with monoprinting and the surrealist technique of decalcomania. Colors combine and separate, shift and cluster.
The 10-meter-wide giant inkjet strip painting in the upper gallery (Richter calls these paintings rather than digital prints) draws you in and takes you away at once. I almost fell when I let the horizontal stripes fill my field of vision. There’s no room to step back all the way back to see everything directly, so your view is always either slanted or close up. I stood there and lurched, my eyes wandering over the racing lines. Color stripes as thin as a hair or as wide as a finger offer a multitude of horizons. Some colors attack, some retreat, some like bass strings, some like garot. The lines are as precise and taut as a laser, and there are too many to count. Everything is happening in front of me, below my knees, above my head, in my peripheral vision, and maybe even in my ears. This is all great, but I can’t stand the phenomenological overload for long.
The process for the strip paintings begins with a scan of one of Richter’s own abstract works; A section of it is split in half and projected on the computer, then split in half and projected over and over again until lines appear. If he continued this process, he would encounter a kind of visual white noise. Ten years ago, Richter told me that he had finished painting strip paintings, as well as flow paintings that looked like miniature examples of his smaller, glass-backed lacquer works. He told me at the time that he mostly moved the paint around until it felt right. “My dream is to close the door and paint it,” he said. “Small paintings, maybe abstracts, maybe landscapes.” Richter painted his last large-scale abstractions in 2017.
Some drawings are incomprehensible wanderings that follow routes known only to the artist.
Whatever he does, he works, mostly drawing with ink and pen on cheap A4 paper. Here are several long series of these drawings, each one filled with precise dates, as if it were a diary. His drawings are full of mappings, tremors, contours, strange clottings, smears and rubbings. Richter sometimes uses solvent to etch graffiti and move objects. There are stains and angry looks, frottage areas, contours and horizons. In one of them, what looks like a sheep’s head is staring at me, surprising me. Others outline profiled, silhouetted heads. Stripes divide an undifferentiated plain, dividing an indefinite area into quarters, like the borders that run this way and that between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. They don’t limit anything here.
Some drawings are mind-bending wanderings, following routes only the artist knows or cares not to know, following a situationist dérive on an ordinary piece of typewriter paper, leading into a space only he can see. The drawings combine subtlety and whimsy, intention and spontaneity. I find body parts, parts of legs and thighs, and something as gnarly as a thrush on a tree trunk. Sometimes it’s like finding faces in the clouds. Imagination – ours as well as the artist’s – insists on having its own way. Caught in the flow between perception and projection, we keep finding things that aren’t there and missing what’s right in front of us. In Richter’s drawings, a man sits at his desk with a piece of paper in a pool of light, and that’s all there is to it.
• David Zwirner is in London until 28 March.