Cinematic Portrait Painting: (Not) About Gerhard Richter

What do we see if we place the cinematic attributes of Gerhard Richter’s portraits in the foreground? This single-authored book explores the intersection of Richter’ portraits with the aesthetics and hermeneutics of the cinema. As a result, the book reveals the fluidity and ambivalence of each portrait and the mise-en-abîme of meaning created between and across Richter’s oeuvre more generally. In turn, when these interpretations are further explained through discourses on cinema, they reveal a new way of seeing and knowing at the end of modernity. The portraits present an infinite performance of the transgression, re-definition and eschewal of traditional notions of portraiture, the identity of painting, subjects depicted, viewers, and the spaces and institutions of exhibition.