STRIP-TOWER, 2023, is a Very Tall Sculpture by Gerhard Richter with his abstracted Strip painting images printed on grids of ceramic tile. Installed through October 2024 at the Serpentine Galleries, it is probably a more successful incarnation than the strip tower shown at Art Basel last year.*
Kieran Healy, meanwhile, spotted an entire tower of Very Short Introductions, the pocket-sized Oxford University Press books currently corrupting Our Youth about whatever.
Turns out both the NYPD and Gerhard Richter have a thing for digital reproduction, fabrication, and scale.
*[Wait, the artist’s website lists a 350cm tall STRIP-TOWER of digital print face-mounted to Perspex as being exhibited at the Serpentine right now. Are there two? Are we pretending there is just one, and that it is not the janky and provisionally mounted wood tower with a labelmaker label on the bottom that was in Basel? Or is that one just inside at the Serpentine? This is the second inaccurate exhibition notation I’ve seen on the artist’s website this year. Richter’s digital reproducing is running ahead of his registrars.]
Gerhard Richter, STRIP-TOWER, 2023 [serpentinegalleries.org]
Previously, related: Gerhard Richter Strip Show