Helga Matura

Helga Matura is a typical example of Richter's Photo-Paintings, a series of realistic, if out-of-focus, copies of photographs that the artist began shortly after his arrival in Düsseldorf from East Germany in 1961. Rejecting the personal expressionism of Art Informel and influenced by the Fluxus movement and Pop Art, Richter turned his attention to the non-art photography of journalism and amateur snapshots as the most reliable and detached record of visual reality.
But photographs, he found, were curiously inadequate. If they were supposed to capture objective reality with precision, examined closely they dissolved either into a seamless modulation of tones or an inifinity of evenly spaced dispersions of grains. Richter's techniques of streaking, blurring or erasing became painting's counterparts for photography's technological shortcomings with the consequence that our experience of a Photo-Painting then becomes an analogy for our elusive hold on reality itself. On the one hand, Helga Matura seduces us by its claim to objective representativeness and on the other refuses us by its out-of-focus effect that disrupts expectations and frustrates both visual and intellectual possession. (Helga Matura, prettily posed here on a grassy bank, was a Frankfurt prostitute who made newspaper headlines in 1966, when she was brutally murdered.) So if art can never capture reality's substance, it can at least reconstruct our experience of its paradoxical resistance.