I’ve never claimed to be cultured. I’ve never tried to pretend that I knew anything significant about art. In fact, until last year, I’d only been in one art gallery in my entire life. Florence is definitely changing that for me. Florence is making me appreciate art, but it doesn’t make want to spend my leisure time looking at it. Athens is saving me from that fate.
Last spring, I went with a group from TCU to the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum. One of the permanent exhibits at the modern contains an oil painting by Gerhard Richter of a German car advertisement. The painting was odd to me since it was SO close of an imitation of the ad. He painted the motion blur around the car like the photograph must have had. Shortly after seeing that, I looked at some of his other works online when I was bored.
Yesterday afternoon, walking down a random street trying to get back to my hotel without pulling out the map, I saw a random building that’s a four story art gallery. The Frissiras Museum: Museum of Contemporary European Painting. On any other trip I would have walked by it and gone to the top tourist places. I stopped (even though they were closed) and looked at their current exhibits. They had two Germans: A. R. Penck and Gerhard Richter. Gerhard Richter!?!?!
So, this afternoon I returned and spent an hour looking at 30 of his paintings. Some are like photos. Others are abstract. I spent five minutes looking at an abstract one, looked to the side at a photo-like piece, looked back at the abstract one and the entire focus changed. It was crazy! When I was looking solely at the abstract, the purples dominated my mind. When I looked back at it, the grays and blacks stuck out the most.
Perhaps the coolest part of the exhibit was the commentary from Richter they displayed. Each floor had different quotations from him on how the artist works to either imitate or skew reality. On the bottom floor, they showed a video of him painting on a huge canvas and talking in German (with Greek subtitles). I only wish I was good enough to understand it!
When the gallery closed I took a right turn and thought I was going through the Plaka back to my hotel. After fifteen minutes, I finally got to a square; I was on the wrong side of the Acropolis! I’m still not sure exactly how I messed up my directions that bad. In any case, I decided that my legs weren’t ready for their fifth ascent and descent of the Acropolis hill in only my second full day in Athens. Luckily, the Metro saved me the time and energy of walking around. Mass Transit, when it works, is a wonderful thing.
As a Christian minister, Adam committed himself to sharing God's Good News to the world. As a photographer, Adam likes reminding people they're made in God's image. And as a computer programmer, he just has to indulge his geeky side every-so-often. Read More…
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