The portrait-format painting Hanged depicts Gudrun Ensslin, a member of the German terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF), hanging from the bars of her cell in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison. The daughter of a Protestant pastor, born in 1940, she studied education along with German language and literature before being radicalised through meeting Andreas Baader. Together with Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, she was a founding member of the RAF, which aimed at changing the society using armed force.

Framed between a dark blanket, hanging left from the door of Ensslin's cell, and a white wall on the right side, the light-coloured bars of the window are silhouetted against the darkness. In the centre of the picture a blurred body can be made out. The legs appear to get lost in its grey surroundings, the body seems to hang in midair.

With this painting Gerhard Richter refers to a documentary photograph, capturing the circumstances of the discovery of Ensslin's suicide on 18th October 1977. When transferring this photograph into the medium of painting, Richter uses his typical technique of blurring. However, the stroke marks are much less pronounced than in other pictures from this series. The subject appears to be uniformly indistinct, a well-balanced play with grey tones is created.

The homogeneous haziness recalls the photographs of the RAF that Richter collected in his compendium Atlas [Sheets: 470–479]. Instead of the raw documentary photographs he had taken from a newspaper archive, Atlas contains out-of-focus copies of those, which illustrate his initial idea for the cycle.

Working on the cycle October 18, 1977, the artist created a second version of Hanged, which he subsequently painted over in an abstract manner. The painting is entitled Blanket [CR: 680-3], referring to the blanket over Ensslin's door, which can be made out despite the overlying paint.

The section of blanket evokes the function of a curtain in art history: a painted curtain indicates that a glance is allowed at something that should not necessarily be seen and places the beholder in the position of a voyeur.
Although here the blanket hangs over the door, it allows a glimpse into the room. Nevertheless Gerhard Richter does not satisfy any voyeuristic gaze, since all details disappear into a blur. It appears almost as if Richter wanted to shield the events from view, by painting over the second version of the painting almost completely.

Notes prepared by editorial team