Image credit: Selldorf Architects
Qatar Museums has announced plans for a permanent pavilion designed by German artist Gerhard Richter in Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art Park. The structure, developed by Richter with Selldorf Architects, is scheduled to open on November 20th, ahead of the inaugural Rubaiya Qatar contemporary art quadrennial.
Image credit: Selldorf Architects
Named the Doha Pavilion: Gerhard Richter, the project has been designed as both a freestanding artwork and a functional setting for a selection of Richter’s paintings and sculptures. The scheme’s hexagonal form comprises six exterior walls clad in printed panels featuring repeating patterns derived from Richter’s experiments with digital image manipulation.
Image credit: Selldorf Architects
The patterns trace their origins to Richter’s 1990 work Abstract Painting (724-4). Beginning in 2010, the artist digitally divided an image of the painting into increasingly narrow vertical strips, eventually producing 8,192 divisions that were mirrored and repeated to create symmetrical compositions. The process informed Richter’s 2011 book Patterns and his subsequent Strip paintings.
Image credit: Selldorf Architects
Inside the pavilion, three large-scale Strip paintings will be installed alongside two floor-to-ceiling Mirrors, part of a body of work Richter began during the 1980s. The mirrors will reflect the artworks, interior space, and visitors as they move through the pavilion.
Image credit: Selldorf Architects
A three-part Strip Tower, designed specifically for the project, will occupy the center of the structure and translate the visual language of the Strip paintings into a freestanding sculpture. A stone sculpture titled Brunnen (Well) will be positioned immediately outside.
“My trip to Doha in 2013 came two years into developing my Strip paintings, and the city’s architecture and history sparked an idea for a pavilion that could unite the thematic threads of that body of work,” Richter said. “The Pavilion’s exterior features decorative tiles based on the Patterns that first led me to the Strips. Inside, Strip paintings hang alongside Mirrors, and the Strip Tower is installed centrally within. Doha is the right place and the only place for my Pavilion.”
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