Gerhard Richter

'Staying Anxious'

2011 Henrietta Stanford 25 min 29 sec

'Staying Anxious': On Death and Wakefulness in Gerhard Richter's
October 18, 1977

Henrietta Stanford

Panorama: New Perspectives on Richter
Symposium at Tate Modern, London, UK
21 October 2011

Henrietta Stanford discusses the paintings of Richter's cycle October 18, 1977 in relation to psychoanalytic aspects, such as anxiety and mourning.

Henrietta Stanford is an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art since 2015. Her research focuses on the ‘violent woman’, and the female subject who takes up arms against the State. Her doctoral thesis was broadly anchored around the West German militant Ulrike Meinhof as a figure. Tracking the representational vicissitudes of the ‘female militant’, the thesis did so via a sustained engagement with Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys From Berlin/1971, (1980), Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977, (1988), and Silvia Kolbowski’s A Few Howls Again?, (2010).