September

Richter created this work just four years after 9/11, on the basis of images circulated in the media. He was acutely aware of the challenge of such a depiction, given the photograph’s ties to the history and memory of the event, its reception as a document of trauma, and the dangers of voyeuristic sensationalism. He addresses these qualms by distancing the photographic reproduction through an act of excavation, precluding its facile consumption as spectacle. As with Table nearby, September emerged through a labored process of applying layers of paint that were then successively scraped, overlaid, rubbed, and so on. Marked by gestures that simultaneously erase and complete the image, the painting attempts a pictorial equilibrium, holding in tension both the polarities of abstraction and representation and the forces of destruction and reconstruction.