Featuring collectors, dealers, auctioneers and a rich range of artists, including market darlings George Condo, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, this documentary examines the role of art and artistic passion in today’s money-driven, consumer-based society.
Himself
Ulay is a conceptual artist whose photography pushed boundaries, and whose love affair with Marina Abramovic produced some of the best pieces of performance art. Diagnosed with cancer shortly after agreeing to film the documentary, Ulay's illness informs Project Cancer, which is part-retrospective, part-visual document of the year he believed could be the last of his extraordinary life.
Himself
Gerhard Richter has spent over half a century experimenting with a tremendous range of techniques and ideas, addressing historical crises and mass media representation alongside explorations of chance procedures. This first glimpse inside his studio in decades is exactly that: a thrilling document of the 79-year-old's creative process, juxtaposed with rare archival footage and intimate conversations with his critics and collaborators.
Self
Curator Robert Storr takes us through the 2002 MoMA Gerhard Richter retrospective.
Himself
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, abstraction - that most quintessentially modernist innovation - maintains a peculiarly contradictory position. Used, on one hand, by post-modernist artists as just one more quotable style amongst many, it is on the other hand still considered an elitist or hermetic language by audiences intimidated by its lack of recognizable subject matter. Yet ultimately, abstraction continues to be a viable creative path for contemporary artists of all generations, many of whom embrace it as the most inclusive and fundamentally resonant of artistic languages. Filmed at the artists' studios, the Dia Center for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Museum during their exhibition, "Abstraction in the Twentieth Century."
Gerhard Langsdorf
A rich and challenging account of the experiences of a German Jewish musician who settled in Britain to escape Nazi persecution. Two of his friends are being sued by a former SS Kommandant, who denies their accusation that he was responsible for the genocide of 300 Belgians. Documentary interviews and archive footage merge with dramatised scenes to create a new way of representing history and memory.
Director
As the only work in this medium by Richter, the film was created for the exhibition Volker Bradke that took place on 13th December 1966 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. For the purpose of this exhibition, Gerhard Richter addressed the person Volker Bradke in different mediums. In addition to photographs, a banner and a large-scale painting Volker Bradke [CR: 133], the film had been screened. Richter transferred one of the stylistic features of his paintings of that time into film: the blurring.
Early documentary about the pop art scene and happenings in Germany.
