More than 50 years ago, Gerhard Richter began mounting parts of his extensive collection of pictorial material on cardboard, hoping to create order and clarity among his archive of photos, newspaper clippings, sketches, drawings, construction plans, room design, collages, overpainted photographs and drafts of paintings. Richter eschewed chronology--his real interest was in iconographical and typological order. A work in progress, this Atlas soon developed into an independent Gesamtkunstwerk mirroring biographical and historical facts--an artistic cosmos of great autonomy, a source of all of his thought and creation. The artist's book has become an important genre for Richter, and in this large-format, four-volume edition, he has not only reproduced Atlas, but rearranged it. His decision to show all of his plates at a scale of 1:2 makes the monumental archive--with more than 5,000 images--visible in all its details for the first time. Richter himself has redefined the color of his plates, piece by piece, through several correction phases, rendering this epic work accessible in a stunning new publication.
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) was born in Dresden, in East Germany. He migrated to West Germany in 1961 and held his first solo exhibition in 1963. Richter's amazingly prolific multimedia output--from photo-paintings, to drawings, to photographs, to landscapes, to portraits, to sculptures--has been exhibited internationally for the last five decades. The artist lives and works in Cologne, Germany.