Atlas

Gerhard Richter closely links his creative artistic work, his painting as well as other visual works, right from the beginning with the collection of their image models. Mostly it is a matter of photographic “images” of various kinds which, along with other visual notes such as sketches and collages, have been entered in his Atlas. “I see countless landscapes, photograph scarcely one in 100 000, painting hardly one in 100 photographed landscapes—I am therefore looking for something quite specific; from this I can conclude that I know what I want.” The conceptual character of Gerhard Richter’s art becomes plain not least of all from the multitude of different formal and substantial approaches which the Atlas unifies within itself as a work composed of sheets. The photographs which Richter collects and makes provide him with models for paintings which offer the advantage of already having reached a high degree of “stylisation” before he goes in search of his own painting. The present Atlas is published in a revised version and format, actualized and created by the artist himself. Gerhard Richter conceptualized the new format for this presentation, providing a single page for each panel thereby developing a new book format. The revised publication presents more than 800 panels, including the War Cut series and 50 recent motifs, especially the drafts for the windows of the Cologne cathedral.