SIX FEET UNDER: Coffins, Graves and Tears

There are no civilizations where the dead remain with the living. First, the dead are sequestered and later, with the assistance of complex grieving rituals usually originating in religious traditions, disposed of, either in fire or earth burials or entrusted to the watery element.
The new skin for the rotting body is the coffin, its new home is the grave, the new city is the cemetery – at least in western civilizations.

The coffin bearers in Gerhard Richter’s Sargträger (1962), on the other hand, are merely carrying out a task. In the painting, based on a photograph and executed in strongly contrasting black and white, the dynamics are between black and white, concreteness and abstraction, mass/order (the numbers) and pictorial anarchy, life and death.