“Gerhard Richter: Painting After All”

One of the greatest (if not the greatest) artists of the last 60 years, Gerhard Richter has explored the relationships between representation and abstraction, painting and photography, history and memory, and—dare one say?—good and evil. That he has done so with no small amount of ambiguity, and ambivalence towards the medium—painting—with which he is most associated, has yielded work that is as confounding at times as it is breathtakingly beautiful. Yet despite its equivocal nature, Richter’s work also draws on his personal experience as a German who lived through the Third Reich, and dealt with its consequences. This show takes the measure of his achievement in the first major NYC survey of his career in 18 years.