Long Live Painting

In an age when we are saturated with images from the mass media, the retrospectives of Gerhard Richter and Wilhelm Sasnal, held at the Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery respectively, present works which explore the nature of seeing and the way in which we experience the world through looking. Taking photographs, and often images from popular culture, these artists reinvent the image through their choice of media, emphasising materiality of paint and its ability to depict images in an entirely different way to a photograph, as seen in Sasnal's 2007 'Roy Orbison 1', left.

The inclusion of family members in the works was a particular inspiration for my current works, referencing collected family photographs. Sasnal's faded or blank faces in his paintings of family photographs draw us in and add an element of mystery and even frustration; our desire to uncover who these people are allow us as an audience to engage with the works on a level which we may not be able to were they simply family portraits. Richter's photorealist works, such as Betty (1977) For me, Richter simply presents use with surely this image could be achieved through photography? He seems here to almost contradict

Richter's work claims to question the nature of painting as a practice; he ask 'what are the capacities and limits of painting? What is its relationship to photography, and how can we think about its material status' (Dr Mark Godfrey, curator). Nonetheless, I feel certain areas of his work forget this aim - his photo-realist pieces, such as 'Betty' (1977), seemed to simply affirm his skill at painting. I was far more intrigued by his less obvious, ambiguous pieces, in which the application of the paint gave the image a whole new life. In his 'Notes 1990', Richter romanticises the act of painting, and rejects modernisms notions of paintings as flat objects - parts of reality which can now seemingly never be representational, and have thus lost their ability to be profound. Through painting from photographs, both Sasnal and Richter address these issues, creating paintings which can never be of reality. In both shows, I felt a strong sense of optimism - a hopefulness for painting and its impact upon society. Through application, thickness, mark making, these artists are able to hint, suggest, question what the image is conveying to us, and highlights the ability of the painter to transform what at first may seem a straightforward image into a powerful statement.