Influencing not just visual art, but music, Gerhardt Richter has worked through decades which have birthed various insular movements and perspectives on painting. Yet, he retains a unique outlook on not just the medium, but what images are portrayed and how.

Richter’s varied approaches focus on different objects, human and otherwise, but still toy with the viewer and refuse to reveal any specific meaning. Obfuscating intent, though, is mirrored in his work.

In 1982 he began a series of works centered on candles. Some images depict a pair and others only a single stick. Occasionally, there’s a draft of wind pushing a flame askew, only hinting at the surrounding atmosphere. It seems as if only candles and drably painted walls exist in this universe.

With no less than twenty of these attempts at rendering candles in something akin to photo-realism, the Art Institute displays one such effort, Two Candles (Zwei Kerzen), slung on a wall featuring other works by the same man. Each appears simple enough, just oil and canvas. The materials, though, aren’t the point. Instead, Richter’s observation of the mundane becomes capacious of holding a viewers attention, because the subject is so foreign to not just his own work, but the work of his contemporaries.

Moving away from experiments in the application of paint to canvas or photographs, Richter painstakingly recreated a moment in time over and over again. The painter hasn’t ever been forthcoming about the intent of his work and in this particular case, obtuse philosophical meanings abound.

Other works Richter’s displayed play with a viewers sense of time, movement and reality. Blurred images, maybe sedentary, posed figures or transient people moving away from the painting’s frame populate a number of his other works. He’s painted simple body parts, just mouths and hands, but also completely abstracted the canvas.

The shift in his work, coming with the candle series, might not specifically jive with popular music during the early eighties. Minimal and experimental music perpetuated by LaMonte Young and Rhys Chatham in New York resulted in a spate of players keen to the notion of appropriating art for album covers, but also for inspiration as related to wailing walls of a single guitar chord played by multiple people simultaneously. A drone might not immediately be the musical corollary people summon when looking at a lonely pair of candles burning for, maybe, no one. (CON’T)