Mouth (Mund)

<p>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.” <em>Mouth</em>, one of the artist’s earliest surviving canvases, is based on a photograph of the French actress Brigitte Bardot.</p>