Panorama, Gerhard Richter-Curation review

The point of this project is to write a review for an exhibition. This review is not the one that we see every week on the magazines and newspapers but we have to focus on a specific element, the curation. The exhibition ‘Panorama’ takes place in Tate Modern, curated by Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey.  Panorama presents an admirably overview of five decades of Gerhard Richter’s work. The title of exhibition is Panorama because it is a retrospective exhibition that groups together all the different significant moment of Richter’s career. I chose this 
exhibition for my essay for several reasons. Firstly, I found really interesting the fact that the exhibition was very clear to me, meaning that the curators did a very good job. The sequence that the pieces presented along with the information on each room separately really helped me to understand in depth the different ideas and concepts of his work. I learned much important information for the artist but in a visual and more relaxing way. Finally, this exhibition has many interesting elements of curation like the number of rooms, the different tags and captions etc.  

The curators chose to represent his works in chronological order and the rooms are also grouped together by period or theme. This is very helpful for someone who doesn’t know much about the artist to see the progression of his work. There are 13 rooms and around 150 pieces out of an estimated total of 1000 – that reflects the diversity of his output. All the rooms have a big label with information about the specific chronological time and the concept of the works. This was at the beginning of the wall in order to make both the sequence of the pieces and the pieces separately more clear for the audience. This label is very helpful for the audience in order to understand the sequence and the development of the artist. Each piece has also a label with the title of the piece and information about the materials used, the museum that the pieces are, the date and sometimes information about the concept.  These labels were either on the right or the left side and are aligned with main axis the top. The labels and captions are very important for the audience as they have the opportunity to understand the concept and the development of his works in depth. The sequence was mostly from the right to left but in some cases the opposite, for example in room 9. All the pieces are aligned with main axis the center. The lighting is also a very important element of the curation. All the lights are on the top of the room and exactly on the center. There are no lights over the pieces of work. The way that the pieces are on the wall with a certain sequence combining with the big and the small caption is very helpful for the audience, even if the audience does not know anything about the artist. Looking the works and reading the captions is very easy for someone to learn the whole career and life of the artist.  information at the beginning of each room is very important and could stand even without the tags that are next to each piece. One more very interesting element is that the curator chose to place two totally different pieces of work on adjoining walls. This happened several times. One representative example is on the sixth room, where the one wall hangs a portrait measuring 30cm by 40cm and on the other wall is a huge abstract painting with high more that 2.5 meters and four meter wide. The portrait is photorealistic and the other is a Abstract-Expressionist but they are equally persuasive.