Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)

The edition of Kl. Badende, as the painting of the same title of 1994, is based on a photograph taken by Gerhard Richter of his wife Sabine in 1993. By printing it on glossy photo-paper, Richter was clearly not disguising the photographic nature of the work. Yet the high-gloss surface jars oddly with the blurred, almost dream-like character of the image. It is this tension between photography, the medium of reportage, and painting, the medium of memory and imagination, that lies at the heart of Richter's figurative works and of the Kl. Badende in particular.

The sense of a distant, slightly faded memory, with which the work is imbued, is further heightened by it's art-historical references to Rembrandt's etchings of female bathers and - most of all - to Ingres' odalisques. It is almost as if Ingres' Bagnante de Valpinçon in the Louvre has suddenly gotten up and turned towards us, still holding onto the cloth on her left arm.