Tour of the exhibition: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Feb. 14-May 21, 2002 and others.

Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post–WWII Germany, in both broad and very personal terms. This handsomely designed book spans the artist’s rich and varied oeuvre from the early 1960s to the present, including photo paintings, portraits, large-scale abstract series, and works on glass. Essays by leading experts on the artist illuminate Richter’s preoccupation with painting in relation to other modes of representation, and emphasize the ongoing importance of the medium’s formal and conceptual possibilities in contemporary art.

Original edition published 2011 by Tate Publishing.

Text by Robert Storr.

Featured here are selected pictures from Gerhard Richter's new group of works entitled Strip Paintings.Published alongside an exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (12 September - 13 October 2012), the works in this beautifully produced, representative, large-format catalogue are reprinted on full pages in 7 colour prints.In his essay, Glass Insurrection Benjamin H.D. Buchloh addresses Richter's glass pieces from 1967 to the present and in The Chance Ornament: Painting Progress Painting Loss he focuses on the new Strip Paintings group for the first time.Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and he lives and works in Cologne.

Gerhard Richter (*1932 in Dresden) has always dealt with the landscape. No other motif has fascinated him as much or kept him so occupied over the years: black-and-white landscapes based on images from magazines and amateur photos; views of mountains and parks painted in thick impasto; softly hued, transparent, illusionist lake scenes. Ever since the subtle Corsica paintings of 1968/69, landscapes have become an established, distinct group of works within the artist's oeuvre. Richter captures reality in a painterly way, such that landscape and abstraction manifest not as opposites but as related concepts. Containing outstanding illustrations and insightful texts, this volume examines Richter's landscapes from the early sixties to the present. (German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-2638-2)

"Richter took an image of his work "Abstract Painting" (CR: 7244) and divided it vertically into strips: first 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048, up to 4,096 strips. This process, involving twelve stages of division, results in 8,190 strips, each of which is reproduced here at the height of the original image. With each stage of division, the strips become progressively thinner (a strip of the 12th division is just 0.08 millimeters; further divisions would only become visible by enlargement). Each strip is then mirrored and repeated, producing an incredibly detailed patterning. The number of repetitions increases with each stage of division in order to make patterns of consistent size. The resulting 221 patterns are reproduced here on landscape spreads"--Amazon.com

Gerhard Richter's abstractions are profound and beautiful, though perplexing. After all these years, they still present a curious challenge: what, exactly, are they? "Richter 858" explores this question by focusing on one suite of extraordinary pictures painted in 1999, soon after his return to work after a silence caused by a stroke. Both investigation and celebration, this book brings together image, music and text in a uniquely compelling way: contributors include the great guitarist and composer Bill Frisell, two sharp-eyed critics, and a baker's dozen of prominent, award-winning poets. Housed in an aluminum slipcase, this lavish, oversized volume features the largest, most sumptuous, and most accurate reproductions of any Richter work. The eight paintings of the suite are shown at more than half-scale, and also, quite untraditionally, presented unbound on heavy paper in a pocket at the back of the book -- allowing readers to mix, match, and re-present the work for themselves outside the confines of the,printed volume. Forty details from the paintings are also reproduced in large-format, accompanied by the poems and texts. These brilliant passages -- rich in incident and intervention, and ranging from the coolly sublime to the loudly riotous -- make fascinating pictures in their own right. Additionally, a double gatefold opens to show all eight paintings in panoramic view. In essence, "Richter 858" presents an elegant, if raucous, meeting ground for our most important contemporary artist and a diverse chorus of American music, poetry, and criticism.

In 1988, Gerhard Richter created one of the most controversial and fascinating political painting-cycles of all time, with his Baader-Meinhof series. In 2002, he returned to the theme of media and political truth with his artist's book War Cut. For this project, Richter photographed 216 details of his abstract painting "No. 648-2" (1987), and, working on a long table over a period of several weeks, combined these 4 x 6-inch details with 165 texts on the Iraq war, published in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on the dates of the war's outbreak (March 20 and 21, 2003). "My method was to attach a number of texts to a number of images without having to think about whether something would be better positioned to the left or the right, above or below," Richter told an interviewer, for a New York Times feature on the publication. "I placed these images so that a connection develops in terms of colors, structures and other characteristics. . . . Some images match the cruelty and the madness described in the texts shockingly well. And others can even serve as illustrations when the texts speak of deserts and other landscapes." Originally published only in German in 2004, this long-awaited English version of this important artist's book presents Richter's powerful attempt to accommodate the extremity of war. For this edition, Richter applied the same process of text selection to The New York Times, using the same dates of the war's outbreak.