H
aunting, hazy, and frozen in t.mes
, Gerhard Richter’s black-and-white photographs of Acht Lernschwesteren (Eight Student Nurses) showcase the artist’s fascination with the abstraction and relationship of photography, painting, and media imagery. This work, executed in 1971-1987, is based on Richter’s own 1966 painting, which in turn he created using yearbook photos of the eight young women. The 1966 photo-based paintings intentionally blur the line between photography and painting, and are reconstituted yet again in this work as photographs. Much of Richter’s corpus and career consist of constant reinvention, repurpose, and abstraction—of style, material, subject matter, and composition. His artistry prompts questions of the viewer regarding the interconnection between reality and representation, examining the strengths and weaknesses of his two mediums of choice: photography and painting.
The subject matter of this work, eight student nurses who were brutally murdered in Chicago by Richard Speck in 1966, echoes a commonality of some of Richter’s work through the 1960s—Richter often used found and media images as source material for his paintings. His use of this imagery provides social commentary on the public’s fascination with pop culture and tragedy, and the media frenzy created by the stories such as Richard Speck’s killing spree. His use of gray-tonal, blurry, innocuous yearbook photographs to render the premature and horrific deaths of the young women (from left to right: above: Gloria Davy, Merlita Gargullo, Valentina Pasion, Suzanne Farris; below: Patricia Matusek, Mary Ann Jordan, Nina Schmale and Pamela Wilkening) memorializes the tragedy in a ghostly, eerie manner. The women, unique from one another in the gradations of light and dark within their portraits, as well as differences in their body positionings, take upon a collects ive identity preserved in t.mes by the disturbings end of their lives.
