Gerhard Richter’s blockbuster exhibition at the Met Breuer in New York was closed after just nine days at the start of the pandemic. But now those works will be permanently housed at a not-yet-built Berlin museum. He has agreed to loan more than 100 works, including a four-piece work addressing the Holocaust that he has pledged never to sell, to a new museum of 20th-century art under construction in Berlin.
The museum is to be built by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, next to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie. It is intended to house the city’s vast store of 20th-century art, which has dramatically outgrown the Neue Nationalgalerie. An opening date for that $500 million museum has not yet been revealed; ground was broken for its construction in 2019.
He has agreed to loan more than 100 works. Included in the loan is Richter’s four-part series “Birkenau” (2014), whose title refers to a World War II–era concentration camp. The dark, foreboding paintings based on photographs of the camp are abstract, and Richter made them using a squeegee that pulled paint across his canvases. Produced in 2014, the series was inspired by documentary photographs of prisoners taken secretly by a Jewish captive in 1944 in the death camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The photographs showed prisoners burning corpses.
Richter, who has vowed never to allow these paintings to enter the market, previously showed them at the Bundestag, and in 2020, they appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They went on view in a presentation at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, where they appear alongside the photographs upon which they are based. “The four Birkenau images, which I never wanted to put on the art market, were the reason for creating a foundation,” Richter said in the statement. “I am glad these pictures are coming to Berlin.”
Also included in the loan, which is expected to go into effect in 2023, are recent abstractions. These works and others from the loan will be showcased in a special gallery set aside for Richter’s art in the Museum of the 20th Century.