Gerhard Richter: Engadin

Curated by Dieter Schwarz and presented across three venues in the Upper Engadin—Nietzsche-Haus, the Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz —this momentous exhibition is the first to explore Gerhard Richter’s deep connection with the Engadin’s alpine landscape.

The work connecting the three exhibition venues is a steel sphere that Richter had produced as an edition, on view at each site. He first presented it at Nietzsche-Haus in 1992, in an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Each unique sphere bears the name of a mountain in the Upper Engadin. The matte, subtly reflective, almost surreal sphere delicately reflects all that surrounds it. It symbolises the sublime yet inhospitable manifestations of nature, which are especially conspicuous in the mountains.

On view at the Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth are paintings that Richter created from photographs taken during his hikes in the Upper Engadin.

The photographs Richter brought back from the Upper Engadin not only served as templates for his paintings, but also became canvases for his experiments with oil and lacquer paint. More than fifty of these alluring small-scale works can be seen at the two exhibition venues in St. Moritz.

Nietzsche-Haus hosts an exhibition of 39 photographs Richter took in Sils for ‘Dezember (December)’—a book he collaborated on with the writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge and published with Suhrkamp in 2010.