Gerhard Richter - Atlas - 2011

From the outset, Gerhard Richter has linked his artistic creation, painting as well as other image forms, most closely to the collection of their image sources. They are usually photographic “images” of various kinds, which, alongside other visual notes such as sketches and collages, found their way into his Atlas. “I see countless landscapes, photograph hardly one of 100,000, paint hardly one of the 100 I have photographed – I am therefore looking for something quite specific; I can conclude that I know what I want.” The conceptual character of Gerhard Richter’s art is not least evident from the multitude of different formal and thematic approaches that the Atlas, as a board of plates, embodies within itself. The photographs that Gerhard Richter collects and incorporates as image templates offer him the advantage of already achieving a high degree of “stylization” before he engages in his own image-finding. The Atlas now appears in a revised, updated edition, expanded by 108 plates, and prepared by the artist himself. For this, Richter has devised a new presentation, according to which one plate is depicted on each page. From this, he has developed a new book format. The present publication shows more than 800 plates, including the War Cut series, as well as around 50 plates with the most recent motifs.