Gesamtkunstwerk Augenblick
Gesamtkunstwerk Augenblick

Summary/Abstract: In 2014 Gerhard Richter produced paintings-enlarged versions of four photographs taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944 and regarded as the sole preserved photographs documenting mass-scale slaughter in Nazi death factories. In a successive stage he painted over the four frames by means of abstract forms. On 9 February 2024 an edition of those paintings was shown in Oświęcim in a specially designed pavilion described as a total work of art composed of reproductions of four photographs “torn out of Hell”, an edition of four Richter canvases, a 8-meter large mirror, and an architectural setting. All incline towards reflection whether the Oświęcim project remains consistent with comments expressed by Georges Didi-Huberman, and to what degree does it betray the message of Images in Spite of All and Bark. Can the question posed by Didi-Huberman – asking whether it is necessary to embellish in order to teach – be applied in the case of a minimalistic pavilion granted rather church-chapel and, at the same time, somewhat “loft” aesthetics? Was Didi-Huberman, while adding the four photographs to his “Gesamtkunstwerk” – in the manner of builders of old erecting churches on sites intended for storing relics or for the sake of honouring them – able not to conceal those “tatters” of fundamental significance?

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