Mouth (Mund)

Mouth (Mund) — Gerhard Richter. 1963.

Medium: Oil on canvas. Dimensions: 67 × 74 cm (26 1/2 × 29 1/4 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

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

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.