House of Cards (5 Panes)

Gerhard Richter German

Not on view


The title of this recent work alludes to American artist Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969), a cuboidal sculpture of unwelded lead plates propped against one another. Yet whereas Serra is concerned with structural limits of lead, Richter addresses the imagistic effects of glass. Beginning with his first work in this material, 4 Panes of Glass from   1967 (displayed on Floor 3), Richter has been preoccupied with the visual and conceptual effects of reflections and refractions caught in glass. In this instance, the variously angled, frameless panes describe a precarious structure that underscores—in a manner akin to the blur in his early paintings—the instability of perception.

House of Cards (5 Panes), Gerhard Richter (German, born Dresden, 1932), Glass and steel

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