Betty, 1991

About the Work

‘Betty’ is one of the best-known subjects in Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre. The portrait of his daughter is not directed towards the viewer, for she has turned round to gaze at the background, where one of Richter’s grey paintings of the 1970s seems to be on display. Richter has translated a photograph into a painting and then made it reproducible again with the offset printing method. In an act comparable to that of a photographer who elevates a detail taken from reality to the status of a picture, the artist chose the motif from his ‘Atlas’, a pool of images he had been assembling since 1962.