Gerhard Richter: Panorama: A Retrospective

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Published on the occasion of Richter's major exhibition at the Tate, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is the first and most complete overview of one of the greatest artistic achievements of our times. Where previous monographs have focused on a single genre within the artist's vast output, this stunningly illustrated survey encompasses his entire oeuvre, now stretching across more than a half-century of activity, including photo-paintings, abstracts, landscapes and seascapes, portraits, glass and mirror works, sculptures, drawings and photographs. It therefore stands as the definitive portrait of Richter's colossal accomplishment to date. Alongside his celebrated abstractions, early black-and-white paintings and the photorealist depictions of candles, skulls and clouds that have become indisputable icons of modern painting, Panorama includes nearly 30 new paintings made over the past ten years, extensive comparative works, studio photographs, archival images and a substantial interview with the artist conducted by Nicholas Serota. This landmark publication is a fitting tribute to one of the world's most celebrated living artists.
Born in Dresden, East Germany, in 1932, Gerhard Richter migrated to West Germany in 1961, settling in Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, and where he held his first solo exhibition in 1963. Over the course of that decade, Richter helped to liberate painting from the legacy of Socialist Realism (in Eastern Germany) and Abstract Expressionism (in Western Germany and throughout Europe). He has exhibited internationally for the last five decades, with retrospectives in New York, Paris and Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne. (20111201)

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Gerhard Richter: Forty Years Of Painting

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Ranging from photo-based pictures to gestural abstraction, Gerhard Richter's diverse body of work calls into question many widely held attitudes about the inherent importance of stylistic consistency, the inaturali evolution of individual artistic sensibility, the spontaneous component of creativity, and the relationship of technological means and mass media imagery to traditional studio methods and formats. Unlike many of his peers, he has explored these issues through the medium of painting, challenging it to meet the demands posed by new forms of conceptual art. In every level of his varied output--from his austere photo-based realism of the early 60s, to his brightly colored gestural abstractions of the early 80s, to his startling cycle of black-and-white paintings of the Baader-Meinhof group--Richter has assumed a critical distance from vanguardists and conservatives alike regarding what painting should be. The result has been among the most convincing renewal of painting's vitality to be found in late 20th- and early 21st-century art. With an extensive and insightful critical essay by curator Robert Storr, a recent interview with the artist, a chronology, an exhibition history, and nearly 300 color and duotone reproductions, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting marks a significant contribution to the understanding of contemporary art in general, and Gerhard Richter in particular.

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The beautiful catalog Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting accompanies the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of this prolific and important German artist. Richter's many artistic achievements vacillate between pure abstraction and a kind of realism. His realistic paintings, based primarily on personal photographs and images from newspapers, range in subject matter from the banal, like rolls of toilet paper, to the extremely potent, such as famous Nazi "doctor" Werner Hyde. The paintings have in common an emotional remove; the re-creating of photographic images points us toward our own possible emotional detachment to the influx of images in the world. A blurred chair, Jackie Kennedy, burning candles, family portraits--Richter lays them all out before us as if to say, Here, they are all the same. The insightful text by MoMA curator Robert Storr provides an in-depth look at Richter's life in postwar Germany, tracing the influences and environment that made his work possible. The book includes a revealing interview with the artist and a detailed chronology of his life and work, plus 138 color illustrations and 165 duotones. --J.P. Cohen

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Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961 - 2007

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For a painter who has so successfully neutralized the declarative potential of his medium, Gerhard Richter has committed to print a surprisingly large amount of discussion on his work. Perhaps it is only natural that an artist whose painting incarnates the Cagean premise that there is nothing to communicate should be moved to address that fact over and over. For this reason, the first edition of Richter's writings, The Daily Practice of Painting (published in 1993 by MIT Press) was an especially compelling collection, gathering the speculations of an artist profoundly involved in states of doubt, uncertainty and negation. Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, it quickly became a basic text in all of the creative fields. For this new, complete edition of the writings, Richter has placed his private archive at the editor's disposal; most of the photographic material comes from this archive and has not been previously published. The volume begins with the artist's farewell letters to his teacher Heinz Lohmar in 1961, is augmented with 15 unpublished texts from 1962 to 1993, as well as texts from the past 14 (highly productive) years of his career, and closes with an interview on his contribution to the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. In between are public statements on specific exhibitions, private reflections drawn from personal correspondence, answers to questions posed by critics and journal excerpts discussing the intentions, methods and subjects of his works from various periods. At more than 600 pages (the first edition was only 288), it is without doubt the essential companion to Richter's colossal oeuvre.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. His first solo show was in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Dusseldorf. Today he is ranked among the world's greatest painters.

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Gerhard Richter Portraits: Painting Appearances

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Gerhard Richter: Landscapes

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No genre has fascinated Gerhard Richter so consistently throughout his career as that of landscape. Ever since his softly overpainted Views of Corsica series of 1968-69, the artist has revisited and reprised its possibilities, creating black-and-white townscapes based on newspaper picture and amateur photographs, mountain and park scenes with heavy impasto, illusionistic seascapes in subtly gradated tones and paintings worked with abstract overpainting. Frequently these paintings interrupt or quietly sabotage the transcendent horizon of the Romantic landscape, but the image presented is not exactly ironized as in other paintings of Richter's. "I felt like painting something beautiful" was the artist's response, when asked about the preponderance of landscapes in his works around 1970. Fifteen years later, he further elaborated that "my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful'... by untruthful I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature--Nature, which in all its forms is against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy..." Richter's approaches to landscape are various indeed, yet uniquely and recognizably his. The first edition of Gerhard Richter: Landscapes was published in 1998; it quickly sold out, was reprinted in 2002 and rapidly went out of print again. This new edition is the first to expand on the 1998, and brings us up to date with Richter's enduring fondness for this subject.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, and rose to prominence in the early 1960s as a member of the Capitalist Realism movement alongside Sigmar Polke and others. His first solo show was in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Today he is ranked among the world's greatest painters.

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Gerhard Richter: Atlas

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This monumental and comprehensive publication maps the ideas, processes, life and times of one of the most important painters of our time. Conceived and closely edited by Gerhard Richter himself, Atlas cuts straight to the heart of the artist's thinking, collecting more than 5,000 photographs, drawings and sketches that he has compiled or created since the moment of his creative breakthrough in 1962. Year by year, the images closely parallel the subjects of Richter's paintings, revealing the orderly but open-ended analysis that has been so central to his art. Offering invaluable insight into Richter's working process, this encyclopedic new edition, which completely revises and updates the rare, out-of-print 1997 edition and includes 147 additional plates, features 780 multi-image panels, each reproduced full page and in full color. Richter redefined the terms of contemporary painting as he looked to photography for a way to release painting from the political and symbolic burdens of Socialist Realism and Abstract Expressionism. From pictures of family and friends to images from the mass media, Richter's photographs--sometimes found, sometimes original--have provided the basis for many of his paintings, often re-emerging in a luminous, monochromatic palette, and falling ambiguously between documentary and historical painting.

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