Product Description

Gerhard Richter is justly famed for the photorealism of his early canvases, but it is less well known that he has also painted directly onto photographic prints. These (mostly small-format) pieces were reproduced in books as early as the first Atlas, but practically all of the works themselves are housed in private collections and rarely exhibited in public. Overpainted Photographs gathers this body of work, which unites the labor of the hand with the work of mechanical reproduction to produce a kind of art as conceptually rich as Richter's better-known paintings, neutralizing the expressive powers of each medium to reach an indifference to their potency. In an overture to Duchamp's "degree zero" found objects, the original photographs are frequently bland in content--an empty office, a ball, a beach scene or tourist snapshot--and Richter's painterly gestures bounce off that content in peculiar ways, sometimes interacting with it, sometimes overlaying it and sometimes threatening to eclipse it altogether. The final effect is to cause both photography and painting to seem like incredibly bizarre activities, disparate in texture but often complicit in aspiration. This monograph offers a unique opportunity to savor what had previously been a neglected but copious aspect of Richter's work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61263 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-01
• Released on: 2009-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 392 pages

About the Author
Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany. Since the early 1960s he has emerged as one of the essential painters of the postwar period, pioneering photorealism with paintings made from found photographs (amateur snapshots, advertisements and book and magazine illustrations) and then from his own photographs. His work has also profoundly engaged with and influenced such genres as Pop and abstract art. A retrospective of Richter's work was shown in 2001 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition was one of the largest ever organized there for a living artist, and traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Customer Reviews

Surprising
The title doesn't suggest much but after seeing these overpainted photographs this is one of my favorite art book purchases of the year. If you like abstract expressionism then these are a delight to look at. Somehow Richter has managed to start with a very realistic photograph and then turn it into an engaging "painting" by painting over the image. It doesn't seem like this should work but somehow the two blend together to create many interesting results. This is a thick book so you get to see a large number of his overpainting experiments. Recommended for fans of Gerhard Richter and abstract expressionism.