Galerie Thomas Zander - Köln

Zander Galerie Paris is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition dedicated to one of the most influential figures of contemporary art, Gerhard Richter, and to one of the most radical aspects of his practice: his grey paintings and objects. The title La Couleur du Renoncement evokes a deliberate act of withdrawal: a renunciation of image and narrative that mirrors Richter’s own radical reduction of painting to its most essential elements. At a time marked by personal doubt and inner turmoil, this renunciation was not a loss but a necessary condition for achieving a profound intensity in which painting regains its fundamental power. Born in Dresden in 1932 and trained in East Germany under the doctrine of Socialist Realism, Gerhard Richter chose in 1961 to leave that ideological system, moving to Düsseldorf just months before the construction of the Berlin Wall. Confronted with the languages of Western abstraction and postwar modernism, Richter deliberately distanced himself from both, instead forging his own form of anti-painting. By the mid-1960s, he had gained recognition for his blurred photo-paintings, based on press images and family snapshots, which called into question the reliability and objectivity of the image. At the same time, he developed systematic series such as his colour charts, abolishing aesthetic hierarchies and placing chance at the core of the creative process. These experiments, rooted in a dialectical engagement with the history of painting and its relationship to photography, prepared the ground for his first monochrome works. Beginning in the early 1970s, Richter fully committed to this exploration with his Graue Bilder (Grey Paintings). These works marked a decisive shift in his practice: by erasing vivid colour and recognisable motifs, Richter stripped painting of both narrative and individual expression. The canvas became an autonomous field, built up through successive layers applied with a brush, roller, or squeegee, producing surfaces that range from uniform matt finishes to dense, vibrating textures. Richter would prepare his mixtures of grey in advance, apply them, and rework the surface, often adding further layers until a fragile visual balance was achieved. Each work becomes a material trace of repeated, controlled gestures, where discipline and chance are in constant dialogue with an almost scientific precision. For Richter, grey–the sum of the three primary colours: red, yellow, and blue–is not an absence but a paradoxical presence. As he explained in a 2004 conversation with artist Jan Thorn-Prikker, “I think grey is an important colour – the ideal colour for indifference, fence-sitting, keeping quiet, despair. In other words, for states of being and situations that affect one, and for which one would like to find a visual expression,” yet through the act of painting the works achieve a form of austerity, calm, and unexpected beauty. This transformation gives the Graue Bilder a meditative and critical dimension, confronting the viewer with the raw materiality of painting. In La Couleur du Renoncement , works from different periods are brought into dialogue to highlight the persistence of this exploration throughout Richter’s career. From the early canvases of the 1970s, to later works on glass and grey mirrors, in which the surface becomes reflective and literally incorporates the viewer into the artwork, a remarkably coherent trajectory unfolds. The grey mirrors not only include the viewer into the pictorial field, but also radicalise painting itself, collapsing its two fundamental paradigms: painting as a window onto the world and as an opaque object. This exploration of gesture alsopaved the way for Richter’s later abstract works of the late 1970s through the 1990s. In these celebrated Abstrakte Bilder , the techniques first developed in the grey paintings, such as layering, scraping, and erasure, resurface in vibrant explosions of colour, while retaining the conceptual clarity and restraint of the earlier monochromes. The Graue Bilder thus stand as both the culmination of a radical act of renunciation and a crucial threshold, opening the path to some of the most innovative abstract works of Richter’s career. Far from being a mere non-colour, grey here stands as a response to the proliferation of images and meanings in contemporary culture. Refusing to offer a stable interpretation, Richter’s Graue Bilder unsettle our visual certainties and lead us back to our own zones of doubt. Through this deliberately restrained language, Richter turns apparent absence into profound intensity, where silence becomes a form of resistance and painting reclaims its essential power.

Zander Galerie is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by New York-based artist Don Dudley, featuring early and recent works on paper complemented by a modular wall installation. Known since the 1960s for transcending abstract painting by embracing industrial materials such as lacquer spray paint and aluminium, Dudley’s practice bridges the divide between Minimalist art movements of the American East and West Coasts. The clear-cut shapes and colours in Dudley’s oeuvre are rich in underlying complexity and continue to explore the perception of form, dimen­sionality, and space. Born in Los Angeles in 1930, Dudley studied at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he was influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting. Through the 1960s, he worked and taught in Southern California, becoming associated with the Finish Fetish school and West Coast Modernism. Dudley taught drawing at Chouinard Art Institute and, invited by famed curator and museum director Walter Hopps, at the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art. He went on to work as curator himself at the La Jolla Art Museum. His first exhibition featured John Baldessari, who was still a graduate student then. Dudley continued his exploration of perceptual ambiguity through drawing, creating drawings with prismatic effects. But soon he decided that he wanted to move beyond drawing. Californian artists like Peter Alexander, Craig Kauffman and John McCracken were moving away from conventional artistic materials and practices, using metal, spray guns, finding ways to make luminous surfaces using lacquers, automobile paint and synthetic resins to make luminous surfaces. Dudley, however, worked towards a more subliminal experience, an abstraction beyond reference to the everyday. Through a process of experimentation with slightly convex aluminium shapes – and after relocating to New York – he discovered his signature thin vertical aluminium modules, which he used to com­pose evenly spaced wall pieces varying in colour combinations and the number of modules. While Dudley’s wall pieces are present and object-like, they also retain a floating quality, hovering between two and three dimensions just before the wall, held in place by the empty spaces between the modules like intervals between notes. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he further explored modular structures as well as spatial installa­tions. As Dudley stated, his aspiration is “to have my work function on a subliminal level, both in the sense of operating below the threshold of consciousness, and in the sense of producing a feeling of awe, the sublime. … I have always aspired to the wordless condition of music, using the simplest possible means, nothing hidden.” In Dudley’s recent works on paper, on view is a selection from 2014 to 2023, dynamic forces are at play: planes and elements seem to overlap, intersect, and fold across each other. He used airbrush and mixed media techniques for the vibrant and at times gradient colours, creating metallic lustre or spatial effects. Like the earlier drawings, these also complement a series of wall pieces using different, partly painted materials. Drawings have always been an integral part of his practice, reflecting the continuing evolution of Dudley’s practice characterised by an interaction of formal rigour, aesthetic poetry and sheer visual experience. Don Dudley’s work has been presented in exhibitions since 1958. By 1972 had shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the exhibition Contemporary American Painting in 1972, and the MoMA P.S. 1 exhibition Special Projects in 1982. His work is in numerous public collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum, New York; and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Zander Galerie Cologne Opening: 6 September 2025, 3pm as part of DC Open Weekend Zander Galerie is delighted to present an exhibition of seminal early work by Lewis Baltz from the 1960s and 1970s, showcasing his landmark serial work The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, Califor­nia and selected photographs from The Prototype Works . Lewis Baltz’s work describes landscapes created as epiphenomena of a post-industrial society. Born in 1945 in Newport Beach, California, he experienced the rapid development of the technology and leisure industries and the suburban expansion in the American West. His aesthetic is cleanly com­posed and detached. Focusing not on the particular or idiosyncratic but on generic forms of appearance, Baltz uses photography as a tool to reflect on socio-economic structures and critically expand the documentary discourse. His redefinition of landscape photography was instrumental in conceptual photography taking its place among other media in contemporary art. Baltz’s earliest body of work are The Prototype Works , which he started in 1965 while still a student at the Art Institute in San Francisco. In this series, he looks for standardised forms in his everyday environment, such as walls and façades, signs, letterings and parking lots. The aesthetic and precision of the black and white gelatin silver prints show references to modernism and, continuing through the 1970s, incorporate influences from his contemporaries in painting and sculpture from minima­lism, conceptual art and land art, as for example John McLaughlin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Smithson. Very early on, the influential New York gallerist Leo Castelli recognised the radicality of Baltz’s approach and mounted his first one-person exhibition when the artist was just 26 years old. While The Prototype Works reveal formal beauty and modernist references in mundane archi­tec­ture, The New Industrial Parks (1974) investigates the economies of the built environment. 51 black and white prints, installed in a grid, reorganize space. The photographs themselves take on the status of objects. Lewis Baltz was part of the groundbreaking exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975 at The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, which marked a paradigm shift in landscape photography. The exhibition included seminal work by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams, and Stephen Shore. Key impulses from this pivotal period have affected the trajectory of photography in contemporary art until today.