Gerhard Richter. Landscapes

Dietmar Elger (ed.)

Following his black and white photo-paintings based on magazine and amateur photographs, Richter's landscapes have emerged since 1968 as an independent work group in his oeuvre: black and white townscapes, mountain landscapes and park scenes, with hard, textured paint-surfaces, romantic seascapes and cloud scenes with the subtlest coloration and luminosity, landscapes that seem to dissolve before ones' eyes, or which are overpainted in an abstract style - as in the color charts based on color sample cards or as in the gray paintings, which in turn also provide the clue to their meaning.
No other motif drew such intensity from Gerhard Richter nor occupied him over such a long period. With outstanding, large- scale illustrations this volume affords a unique insight into Richter's landscape paintings, where landscape and abstraction are not opposed to each other, but emerge instead as related concepts in the painter's appropriation of reality.