Like Levine, Bidlo works from reproductions, the means through which the modernist canon has been broadcast and maintained, but his reliance on
hand facture produces a certain slippage between the appearance of the original and that of the re-creation.
In 1985 Richter said that he was ready to «try out my abstract works in printmaking but in a more conventional manner... etching and all that,» but it did not happen.12 Instead he continued to cycle between mechanical reproduction (with increasingly refined production values) and haptic
hand -
facture.