Construction has started on the Gerhard Richter Exhibition Hall in Oswiecim, Poland. The building, designed by the artist himself, is being developed in the grounds, and in co-operation with, the International Youth Meeting Center in Oswiecim/Auschwitz.
The "Gerhard Richter: Birkenau" exhibition building will be showing the individual special edition of his Birkenau Cycle which the Gerhard Richter Art Foundation has loaned long-term to the International Auschwitz Committee for this purpose. The exhibition collection will also include the four-part Gray Mirror, which has been showing at various venues around the world since 2014 together with the Birkeanu pictures, as well as reproductions of the four original photographs which special unit prisoners secretly snapped in Birkenau in 1944. It was these photographs that prompted Gerhard Richter to once again grapple with this topic. The four photographs are considered to be the only existing photographic evidence of the Holocaust, recording the murder and cremation of Jewish people Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The exhibition building is located about four kilometres away from the former concentration and extermination camp, Birkenau, where the photographs were taken. The building, which is being funded with a donation from the Volkswagen company, is scheduled for general completion this year. The exhibition will be opening to the public in 2024.
In Berlin Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, said: "The Birkenau pictures and the actual exhibition building bear artistic and architectural witness to Gerhard Richter’s constantly recurring focus on this deeply disturbing subject. The fact that these pictures are now finding their place close to their historical source, just a few kilometres away from the crematoria and the fields of ashes in Birkenau, is both moving and heartening for the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. To them, Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau paintings are a powerful signal against forgetting, and a symbol of empathy and solidarity expressed by the artist for them and their murdered families. And in these times of populist hatred and increasing anti-Semitism, the survivors of Auschwitz also regard these works as elemental proof that the artistic, educational and political process of coming to terms with Auschwitz and its causes is never ending and will remain so throughout all time."
Gerhard Richter himself is convinced: "Auschwitz/Oswiecim is the right place for these works, for this ensemble, to be shown permanently in their own building. There are many other places that became crime scenes of such terrible atrocities, but the name of Auschwitz has come to symbolize them all, and it must act as a reminder of them all. And to me personally, this is also an honour and a comfort, and it gives me the feeling of a task completed."
