Gerhard Richter Livres

"Je n'obéis à aucune intention, à aucun système, à aucune tendance ; je n'ai ni programme, ni style, ni prétention. J'aime l'incertitude, l'infini et l'insécurité permanente", Gerhard Richter.

Gerhard Richter (né en 1932) est unanimement considéré comme l'un des plus importants peintres encore en activité et a exposé dans les plus grandes institutions du monde. Connu tant pour ses tableaux figuratifs inspirés de la photographie que pour ses peintures abstraites, Richter associe de manière inédite des éléments empruntés à ces deux champs artistiques. Publié à l'occasion de cette vaste exposition rétrospective, fruit d'une collaboration entre la Tate Modern à Londres, la Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen à Berlin et le Centre Pompidou à Paris, ce catalogue embrasse toute la carrière de Richter. Réunissant les contributions de conservateurs et d'historiens de l'art, un nouvel entretien avec l'artiste, et près de 300 reproductions, il constitue l'ouvrage le plus complet sur l'oeuvre exceptionnelle de Richter.

Bien que Richter se soit exprimé à maintes reprises par la parole et l'écrit, jusqu'à présent il s'est toujours montré réservé quant à la publication de ses textes. Hormis de nombreuses interviews, seuls quelques fragments de textes isolés ont été publiés ici et là.Outre ses notes et extraits de journal écrits au fil des mots, trouvera-t-on des essais, des lettres, prises de positions et déclarations, manifestes, entretiens, conversations et dialogues.Les notes écrites de Richter accompagnent l'acte de peindre, elles le mettent en question et subissent même son correctif. Au lieu d'un texte anticipatoire et explicite, apparaissent une pensée synchrone et une réflexion ultérieure, raisonnée au sens le plus littéral du terme, où le réfléchir sur soi-même est le prolongement du doute.Comme nul autre artiste contemporain, Richter s'interroge sur le possible et l'impossible, sur la fonction et l'autonomie de l'art actuel.

Il s'agit d'une adaptation de la 5e édition allemande (1988) complétée de manière à actualiser les thèmes ayant évolué ces dernières années. A côté des chapitres consacrés au métabolisme primaire (photosynthèse, synthèse des protéines et acides nucléiques, etc.), une large place est faite à l'étude du métabolisme secondaire (alcaloïdes, terpènes, etc.). L'aspect méthodologique est traité au fur et à mesure des besoins. Pour des étudiants de premier cycle universitaire. [SDM].

This monumental and comprehensive publication maps the ideas, processes, life and times of one of the most important painters of our time. Conceived and closely edited by Gerhard Richter himself, Atlas cuts straight to the heart of the artist’s thinking, collecting more than 5,000 photographs, drawings and sketches that he has compiled or created since the moment of his creative breakthrough in 1962. Year by year, the images closely parallel the subjects of Richter’s paintings, revealing the orderly but open-ended analysis that has been so central to his art. Offering invaluable insight into Richter’s working process, this encyclopedic new edition, which completely revises and updates the rare, out-of-print 1997 edition and includes 147 additional plates, features 780 multi-image panels, each reproduced full page and in full color. Richter redefined the terms of contemporary painting as he looked to photography for a way to release painting from the political and symbolic burdens of Socialist Realism and Abstract Expressionism. From pictures of family and friends to images from the mass media, Richter’s photographs--sometimes found, sometimes original--have provided the basis for many of his paintings, often re-emerging in a luminous, monochromatic palette, and falling ambiguously between documentary and historical painting.

Gerhard Richter is recognized worldwide as one of the greatest living artists. With a brush that deftly and romantically captures abstract details and blurred newspaper images alike, he has transformed our understanding of art in the age of photographic reproduction and mass-media imagery. 100 Pictures is a faithful reprint of the intimate, cloth-bound book Richter created in 1996 as a nonstandard anthology of his oeuvre. Following a short introduction to his early work, which features pictures long held in his studio, 100 Pictures presents Richter's output from an intensive period of work between 1995-96. Though this period mainly saw the production of abstract works, it also begat a cycle of eight small-format paintings of an intimate, private nature, which portrays his young wife Sabine as a Madonna-and-child. 100 Pictures is an extraordinary document of contemporary art, finally back in print.

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) is one of the most highly regarded of contemporary artists, and his series of 15 paintings known as October 18, 1977, is one of the 20th century's most famous works on a political theme. It commemorates the day on which three young German radicals, members of the militant Baader-Meinhof group, were found dead in a Stuttgart prison; they were pronounced suicides, but many people suspected that they had been murdered. Richter's paintings, created 11 years after this traumatic event, are among the most challenging works of the artist's career.These hauntingly powerful images, derived from newspaper and police photography, are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and will be on view beginning in September 2000 as part of the MoMA2000 series of exhibitions. In this book, Robert Storr provides necessary political background to the series, but his approach is art historical, offering insight into the complexities of "history painting" in the modern era.