Mouth (Mund)

In the early 1960s Gerhard Richter enlarged found images—such as personal snapshots or photographs drawn from newspapers or magazines—and transferred them onto canvas. He then blurred these by dragging a dry brush over the wet pigment. As Richter explained, “I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. . . . I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant in- formation.” Mouth, one of the artist’s earliest surviving canvases, is based on a photograph of the French actress Brigitte Bardot.