Breathe Out | Installation View at Galerie Tanja Wagner

Grit Richter | Breathe Out | Installation View at Galerie Tanja Wagner | 2024

Grit Richter‘s solo exhibition Breathe Out at Galerie Tanja Wagner showcases new paintings, each of which opens up a completely different world. In her latest works, figurative elements are shaped with concrete actions and placed in scenic spaces.

Human relationships, sexuality, exhaustion, desire, a sense of irony and miscommunication are evoked, as in the large-scale work The Broken Hearts Society, where two curvy, faceless bodies sprawl on the floor. The scene, bathed in warm red and purple tones, feels intimate—yet upon closer inspection, however, the gestures of the figures reveal a fist formed into a casual fist bump on one hand, and on the other, half of a hopeful hand-heart.

References to the digital world are present in Richter’s work in many ways. The ethereal color gradients, cloud- and star-filled skies, and grids are reminiscent of those familiar from computer programs like Windows or Photoshop and reappear as a subtle white-gray gridded carpet throughout the exhibition space. Richter consciously chooses such backgrounds as a simple yet effective way to give her figures a pictorial space. During the creation process, she works exclusively digitally—this allows her to experiment with scenarios and assign different spaces and actions to the figures until the final sketch is set. Layer by layer, controlled and precise, Richter then applies oil paint to the canvas, which in their intensity and clarity appear to glow from within.

For Richter, the incorporation of digital programs and the prior determination of motifs turns the physical act of painting on canvas into a meditative process, free from any need for decision-making. Breathe Out, as we know from meditative practices, means to exhale, let go, create space, and bring oneself into harmony with the world.

In her work, Richter not only makes a multilayered and profound universal memory of emotions, sensations, and memories visible and tangible, but also includes our digital experiences—just as they are inseparably intertwined with our current reality.

(Press release Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin 2024)