Gerhard Richter, Reader, (Detail), 1994, Oil on canvas, 72 x 102 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Gerhard Richter 2023 (16032023)
GERHARD RICHTER
1932 - GERMANY
Gerhard Richter's art, which questions the boundaries between photography and painting and re-evaluates this relationship through the concepts of memory, reality and representation, is naturally the product of a powerful transformative vision. In fact, this approach, which focuses on the dynamic relationship between remembering and forgetting, turns photography into the subject of a creative plastic experience rather than a narrative depth conveyed through photography. It exposes it to linguistic change. It drags it into a conceptual dimension. Therefore, the evolution of the photographic image into a painting shaped by painterly interventions over time becomes significant as an attempt at emancipation that erases the reality and temporal traces of the visible in the process of representation and linguistic change. The will to shape that causes this brings out the particular and unique results of the perspective on the issue of representation, with the intellectual and emotional ebbs and flows experienced in the process leading up to the turn of the century. At times, it also allows for a radical harshness, clearly seen in the Birkenau paintings, which preserve their simple reality in all circumstances.
Essays on RIchter’s art
PARIS EXHIBITIONS / 2025 – 2026
fondatıon louıs vuıtton / parıs
Gerhard Richter, Retrospective, Curators: Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota, October 17, 2025–March 2, 2026, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France,
DAVID ZWIRNER / PARIS
Gerhard Richter, Solo Exhibition, October 20, December 20 2025, David Zwirner, 108, rue Vieille du Temple, 73003 Paris, France.
Gerhard RIchter Catalogue RaIsonné / Volume 1-6
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1, 1962-1968, Edited and Texts by: Dietmar Elger, Graphic Design: Gabriele Sabolewski, Neil Holt, German, English, Publishing by: Hatje Cantz, October 2011, 512 Pages, 539 Photos, Clothbound with dustjacket, 267 mm x 309 mm.
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 2, 1968-1976, Edited and Texts by: Dietmar Elger, Graphic Design: Gabriele Sabolewski, Neil Holt, German, English, Publishing by: Hatje Cantz, March 2022, 528 Pages, 700 Photos, Clothbound with dustjacket, 263 mm x 301 mm.
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 3, 1976 – 1987, Edited and Texts by: Dietmar Elger, Graphic Design: Gabriele Sabolewski, Neil Holt, German, English, Publisher: Hatje Cantz, June 2013, 640 Pages, 702 Photos, Clothbound with dustjacket, 266 mm x 303 mm.
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 4, 1988-1994, Edited and Texts by: Dietmar Elger, Graphic Design: Gabriele Sabolewski, Neil Holt, German, English, Publishing by: Hatje Cantz, June 2015, 600 Pages, 645 Photos, Clothbound with dustjacket, 257 mm x 301 mm.
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 5, 1994-2006, Edited and Texts by: Dietmar Elger, Graphic Design: Gabriele Sabolewski, Neil Holt, German, English, Publishing by: Hatje Cantz, April 2020, 600 Pages, 700 Photos, Clothbound with dustjacket, 266 mm x 308 mm.
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 6, 2007-2019, Edited and Texts by: Dietmar Elger, Graphic Design: Gabriele Sabolewski, Neil Holt, German, English, Publishing by: Hatje Cantz, March 2022, 528 Pages, 700 Photos, Clothbound with dustjacket, 263 mm x 301 mm.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Gerhard Richter, Contributors: Dieter Schwarz, Designer: Silke Fahnert and Uwe Koch, Publisher: David Zwirner Books, Printer: Triofolio-Verona, 192 pages, English, New York 2023.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Gerhard Richter, Authors: Nicholas Serota and Dieter Schwarz, Contributors: Michael Lüthy, Georges Didi-Huberman, Guy Tosatto, Dietmar Elger, Publisher: Fondation Louis Vuitton, Citadelles&Mazened, English, 416 pages, Papperback with flab, October 2025, Paris.
PAINTING SERIES AND PROJECTS
DRAWINGS
Richter stopped painting on canvas in 2017. After this date, he focused on drawing. These works, drawn and painted on A4 paper, consist of independent experiments produced with coloured ink and pencil. They resemble diaries kept in drawings. They directly reflect the artist’s intellectual and emotional intensity in a fluid manner. In addition to rulers, compasses and other tools, he uses erasers and scrapers, just as he does in his paintings. He also employs frottage techniques and solvent chemicals to create stains. This experimental approach, which increasingly evokes the visuality of maps, filled with vibrating contours, erasures and stains, reflects a strange spontaneity in exploring the visual possibilities of drawing as a medium. It seems to be stuck in the flow between perception and reflection, chasing imagination, continuing to find things that are not there or missing what is right in front of us.
STRIP-TOWER
Strip-Tower (2023) is a project that expands on Richter’s sixty years of research in the fields of painting, photography, digital reproduction, and abstraction. The artist, who began developing the Strip Paintings series in 2010, transformed his photographed and scanned work Abstract Painting 724-4 into horizontal and vertical strips by dividing it into two strips in a digital environment, then four, eight, sixteen, and thirty-two strips. The vertical strips of the painting were stretched horizontally, laminated onto aluminium, and covered with plexiglass. The colourful striped ceramic tiles that form Strip-Tower are a dense composition covering intersecting vertical panels. This work is essentially based on Richter’s ongoing interest in reflections, systems, and repetitions. It has become a symbolic monument to the artist’s approach of self-examination through painting, photography, digital reproduction, and abstraction, which has occupied his practice for over sixty years. [https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/gerhard-richter-strip-tower/]
CAGE PAINTINGS
19 April – 26 June 2021, Gagosian Gallery, New York, USA
A series of paintings designed by Gerhard Richter in 2006 is named after the American experimental composer John Cage. The Cage paintings are the result of gradual and layered painting and erasure processes. Their surfaces consist of erased and scratched marks, brushstrokes, and painted areas that can appear delicate and fluid as well as coarse and rigid. Interested in John Cage’s ideas about ambient sound and silence, Richter took a radical approach in this series, refusing to use his hands and instead employing his famous eraser. Richter also created a six-part series of prints in 2020 that continues the influence of this series. Both in their painted and printed forms, the Cage paintings are an important series that brings together a painterly process that questions the emotional impact of colours and transforms into improvisation through dynamic body movements.
ATLAS
STRIP PAINTINGS
Richter’s Strip paintings are an original and conceptual series that emerged in the later stages of his career. They are quite different from his abstract works. They consist of his abstract paintings being transformed into thin coloured strips based on digital photographs of them. The Strip series is a process of further abstracting an already abstract painting. Here, Richter focuses on the transformation of the image and the issue of data loss or gain. This new painting practice, which means the complete disappearance of the artist’s hand, produces visually stimulating structures consisting of coloured vertical or horizontal lines. On the other hand, this series of paintings, which began in 2011, is considered one of the most radical expressions of Richter’s thoughts on the process of making art. It involves a deep questioning of fundamental issues such as what a painting is, the role of the artist, and image production in the digital age.
4900 COLOURS
4900 Colours consists of bright monochrome squares randomly arranged in a grid pattern to create dazzling kaleidoscopic layers of colour. The 196-square panel, comprising 25 coloured squares, is designed to be configured in various variations, from a single large-scale piece to numerous smaller images. Richter developed a special version consisting of 49 paintings for the Serpentine Gallery in 2008. 4900 Colours was partly inspired by Richter’s design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, which replaced stained glass windows destroyed during the Second World War. The 4900 Colours concept played an important role in its development. The development of 4900 Colours was also influenced by Richter’s first series in 1966, grid paintings created by copying industrial colour charts produced by paint manufacturers on a large scale. As in his photographic paintings, his use of found material as a source eliminated the artist’s subjective compositional preferences; however, the Colour Chart Paintings took this a step further by eliminating the hierarchy between subject and representational purpose and focusing on colour to create an egalitarian artistic language.
GLASS AND MIRROR PANELS
Gerhard Richter has produced glass and mirrored works that contain genuine reflections on the nature of pictorial representation. The artist seeks to explore the possibilities of these materials in order to reproduce visual reality or to continue experimenting with colours, textures, techniques and gestures. He produced his first glass works in 1967, thereby opening up a new field of work and thought related to debates on representation and perception. For example, the sculpture 11 Panels (2004) utilises the material’s ability to be viewed from within as well as its reflective properties. The transparency of each glass panel, leaning against the wall at different angles, multiplies the reflections into distorted shapes, which constantly change as the viewer approaches and moves away from the work. The blurring effect is reminiscent of that seen in Richter’s figurative paintings.
REPRESENTED BY
David Zwirner is a prominent art gallery renowned for hosting innovative, original and pioneering exhibitions. Having helped numerous artists develop their careers, David Zwirner opened his first gallery in New York’s SoHo district in 1993. In the early 2000s, it relocated from SoHo to Chelsea. In 2012, it opened its gallery in London’s Mayfair district, followed shortly thereafter by galleries in Hong Kong, Paris, and, two years ago, Los Angeles, which boasts extensive exhibition spaces and facilities. David Zwirner also contributes to the art world through an online gallery programme, a podcast called Dialogies, and content production under the name Utopia Edition. He also continues to publish catalogues and books under the name David Zwirner Books. In 2021, he established a comprehensive company called Platform where artworks can be purchased.
21. yüzyıl mimarisinin en ikonik eserleri arasında yerini alan ve mimari projesi Frank Gehry’e ait olan binada 24 Ekim 2014’ten itibaren hizmet vermeye devam eden Fondation Louis Vuitton, yaratıcı ve yenilikçi projeleri sergilemeye özen gösteriyor. Çağdaş sanat gelişmelerini tarihsel bir bakış açısıyla değerlendiren büyük sergi yapımlarına öncelik veriyor. “Tutkunun Anahtarları”, “Modern Sanatın İkonları, Shchukin Koleksiyonu”, “Courtauld Koleksiyonu: Empresyonizm İçin Bir Vizyon”, “Modern Sanatın İkonları, Morozov Koleksiyonu” gibi yapımların yanı sıra, önemli sanatçılara adanmış “Yeni Bir Dünya İcat Etmek: Charlotte Perriand”, “Simon Hantaï – Yüzüncü Yıl Sergisi” gibi sergileri de sunuyor. Vakıf son olarak ünlü Alman sanatçı Gerhart Richter’in retrospektifine yer veriyor.
GERHARD RICHTER
Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) was born in Dresden, Germany. He spent his childhood and youth in Waltersdorf. Between 1951 and 1956, he studied art at the Dresden Hochschule für Bildende Künste. In 1959, he visited Documenta II in Kassel, West Germany, and this experience inspired him to change his artistic direction. He left East Germany in 1961. He resumed his studies at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. In 1972, he was selected to represent Germany alone at the Venice Biennale. The artist, who has held solo exhibitions at many renowned galleries and museums, has produced a wide variety of works that appear extremely complex within a stylistic transition derived from the relationship between photography and painting. The artist, who takes a deep look at the issue of representation and the material reality of art, lives and works in Cologne. (Photo: Timothy Greenfield Sanders)
GUIDE / 2021-2025 PUBLISHED
İZMİR - LONDON
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