Gerhard Richter, Tisch/Table [CR-1] 1962, oil on canvas, 90 x 113 cm, a painting published and reproduced for decades on which David Zwirner asserts a 2023 copyright on the artist’s behalf
In 1991, Richter told Tate curator Sean Rainbird that the source image of Tisch (Table), 1962, which the artist situated as the starting point of his project, came from Domus. “I began to paint it, but I was not satisfied with the result, so I erased it with newsprint.”
“Image of the extendable table designed by Ignazio Gardella, published in Domus issue no. 321.” via domusweb
To celebrate Richter’s 94th birthday, Domus credited itself for launching his career with a single page: a feature from Domus No. 321, in Summer 1956, on an extendable table designed by Ignazio Gardella. “While there is no direct confirmation, the editorial team suggests that this image may have been the original source.” Here, Domus, can I Google that for you?
Gerhard Richter, Brǔcke (am Meer), CR-202, 1969, 93 x 98 cm, collection: Neues Museum, Nuremberg, image via gerhard-richter.com
Martin Herbert writing on Gerhard Richter for Apollo
For three decades, he could increasingly do anything, while coolly suggesting that perhaps none of it mattered in the grand scheme of things, even as his paintings also persistently whispered that maybe it did. Like so much great art, his can be endlessly revisited due to its fathoms-deep ambiguity. Look at an earlyish, unassuming canvas like Bridge (at the Seaside) (1969): a spit of land and outstretching bridge forming a horizon line under a delicately blueing, star-dotted evening sky, nobody around, the lower half fuzzily ambiguous: maybe it’s water, maybe beach, maybe half of each. Here is a casual, banal, snapshot-style update of the German landscape tradition, a knowingly minor thing. Yet it’s also somehow hushed and beautiful, almost tender—everything and nothing swirling together for you to tease apart or accept, finally, as indivisible.
Gerhard Richter, Color Chase One and Color Chase Two, installed at 270 Park Avenue, image via JPMC
A review of Gerhard Richter’s 2023 show at Zwirner was built on a decade-old anecdote where the reviewer’s non-art savvy date dismissed his art for looking “like something that would be in the lobby of a bank.”
Zwirner presented that show as Richter’s last paintings. Which, last squeegee paintings, maybe, but we now know Zwirner had to know there were more paintings in the queue. He had to have known of the commission for Richter to make at least two more massive paintings—for the lobby of a bank. Not just any bank, though, or any lobby: JP Morgan Chase’s menacing, new giga-headquarters at 270 Park Avenue. Color Chase One and Color Chase Two, jagged compositions of enamel on interlocking aluminum panels, recently unveiled with no creation date, were not a quick project.
Gerhard Richter, 4900 Farben, Version XI, 2007, 196 enamel on aluminum on dibond panels, 680 x 680 cm, installation view via the Fondation Louis Vuitton
Andrew Russeth saw a connection to Richter’s color chart paintings, and I’d zoom in on the mega-chart, 4900 Farben/4900 Colours (2007) whose 196 reconfigurable aluminum panels match the Chase works in scale, material, process, and corporate sponsorship [It was made for LVMH.] I’d even guess that 93yo Richter began these works à la Matisse, by cutting up reproductions of 4900 Colours and rearranging the shards. [This project, these works, could be the subject of a show, or a book. 4900 Colors has its own micro-site. But since the dawn of the Zwirner era, Richter’s once exhaustive website looks like it stopped trying to keep up.]
Anyway, Andrew Russeth not incorrectly judged the Chase paintings to be “punchy, pleasantly awkward, and ultimately forgettable: perfect corporate-lobby art.” To which Richter trueheads can only respond, “Hell, yeah!” Lobby art is actually an entire subcategory of Richter’s work.
Gerhard Richter, Wolken (rosa), 2025 and Wolken (blau), 2025, 200 x 300 cm, facemounted on Diasec chromogenic print on aluminum, ed. 12+3AP, via David Zwirner, via @mentaltimetraveller
Imagine owning one of the 1970 Cloudstriptychs that Richter decides to make fifteen more of. Do you get one? In Paris? From David Zwirner?
Richter’s expansive body of editioned works has consistently allowed the artist to experiment with the production of visual facsimiles and the iterative translation and interplay of mediums.
…
These editions are monumental objects in their own right: chromogenic prints face-mounted to an acrylic surface and on aluminum panels, each created on the same scale as the painted triptychs. To make these works, Richter photographed the original oil paintings and altered the colors of the resulting image—thus investigating the existence of a subjective visual reality that somehow exceeds the bounds of real-world perception. Through this process of recursive image transformation across mediums and domains both analog and digital, Richter approaches a new kind of abstraction that radically collapses the distinctions between painting, photography, and the printed image.
I am an unwavering admirer of Richter’s investigations of the photo copy. But I am pretty sure that this process of recursive image transformation radically enhances, not collapses, the distinctions between painting, photography, and the printed image. And if I had one of those Wolken triptychs I would definitely get a matching full-scale edition to prove it.
from l to r: Gerhard Richter, Grau CR 364-2, 80.5 x 60 cm; Blinky Palermo, Untitled Stoffbilder, 1971, 200 x 140 cm; Gerhard Richter, Grau CR 363-4, 250 x 195.5 cm, all at Christie’s London [update: incredible, all unsold]
Two Richter Grau paintings and one Blinky Palermo Stoffbilder fabric painting are coming up for auction in London during Frieze. The big ones are both from the Crex Collection, which I thought had sold everything at Sotheby’s a few years ago, but I guess not, because they’re selling stuff at Christie’s now.
The black textile Palermo and the large grey Richter in the evening sale, are illustrated side by side in the essays, but at a scale that looks like they’re a pair. Which they are not. These paintings, while awesome, are not the same size, or the same year, or even the same materials. And it kind of annoyed me enough to composite together this image, to show their actual scale. There’s another, much smaller Grau painting for sale in the day sale, and I stuck that in, too.
Gerhard Richter, Fingerspuren/ Finger Marks (with Palermo), CR 253, 1970, 200 x 100 cm each panel, so they made a square as tall as the black Palermo up there, destroyed. image via gerhard-richter.com
Meret Oppenheim, Röntgenaufnahme des Schädels M.O. / X-Ray of M. O.’s Skull (1964). Contact silver print from the original x-ray plate, 15 7/8 x 12 in., via Peter Freeman
In 1964 Meret Oppenheim made a self-portrait with an X-ray machine of her head—skull and jewelry—in profile. Then she made perhaps three contact prints using the X-ray plate, though only one is currently known. Peter Freeman presented it in 2022.
Oppenheim’s self-portrait is better known through the editions she made later, including a smaller, 10 x 8 in. edition of 20, released in 1981, which bears the caption, “Meret Oppenheim (1913-2000).” Whether she lived til 2000 [she did not, but died in 1985], Oppenheim was amused to imagine the photo encouraging future historians to state she did.
Between 1989 and 1991 Isa Genzken made several X-ray self-portraits of her head, some engaging in activities like laughing and drinking. Two were included in her 1992 exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, “Everybody needs at least one window.”
R.H. Quaytman, Passing Through The Opposite Of What It Approaches, Chapter 25 (Genzken’s Skull), 2012, wax, tempera, gesso, on two panels, 12 3/8 x 12 3/8 in. and 12 3/8 x 20 3/8 in. via Ren Soc
In 2013 R.H. Quaytman presented a show at the Renaissance Society that referenced the 40 year career of executive director Susanne Ghez. Passing Through The Opposite Of What It Approaches, Chapter 25 (Genzken’s Skull) (2012) includes an inverted version of one of Genzken’s X-Ray self-portraits.
Gerhard Richter, Skull (CR 548-1), 1983, oil on canvas, 55 x 50 cm, via Gerhard Richter
I don’t think any of this has anything to do with Gerhard Richter making a series of Skull paintings in 1983—a year into his 11-year marriage to Genzken— or to him making a laminated photo edition of Skull in 2017.
Robert Rauschenberg, Sky House II, screenprint on silk collage, bamboo, 372 x 248 cm, image via ig/RRF Sky House I, meanwhile, Rauschenberg kept for himself, according to former assistant Thomas Buehler
Robert Rauschenberg’s genius in making a 20×10-foot Art Kite was in understanding the opportunity while ignoring the assignment. Because the opportunity was to make two Art Kites, and have your Art Kites fly in the “vernissage in the sky” at an Art Kite Festival held amidst the blossoming sakura on the grounds of Himeji Castle. While the assignment was to promote Lufthansa.
And for the first 461 pages, I thought the show was about how flying and art are the same glorious expression of human freedom: “The world tour of the Art Kites is sponsored by Lufhansa” [p.462]
Obviously, it was more than that, but also just that. The Art Kites Project was sponsored by Lufthansa and organized by Dr. Paul Eubel, director of the Goethe Institute Osaka, which commissioned 100 artists from around the white world and Japan to create Japanese-style kites in 1987. The kites would fly once in Japan, on April 1 & 2, 1989, and once in Europe, on April 21 & 22, 1990, go on tour for three five years, to 21 museums in Japan (8), Europe (12), and Canada (1), before being auctioned off.
I just counted a thousand sheets of prints, and yet the Gerhard Richtermaxxing that kicked in around Panorama, his 2011 Tate Modern retrospective, still keeps surprising me.
I’ve now seenthreeworks from Museum Visit (2011), Richter’s largest series of overpainted photographs, with a provenance of Tate Modern. So were these sold to Tate friends and donors? Were they being sold in the gift shop, too? It was a veritable Murakamitown in there.
Overpainted Photographs have this unique trajectory, created as personal, even seemingly private gestural experiments from rejected photos and leftover paint in the artist’s studio, immediately edited, then apparently given as gifts to friends, marks of connection and proximity, trickled out into the market by one local dealer, and accumulate over decades into a body of work that begins to attract critical and public attention. The early mass production series Firenze (1992) could be accounted for in the context of Richter’s artist book practice [or ignored.]
Reading Marcus Heinzelmann’s essay for the catalogue of the 2009 Overpainted Photographs exhibition at Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, the series emerged from the surfeit of paint and photos that surrounded Richter at the end of each studio day. Ready material, random process, and ruthless evaluation converge in a moment, and barely half survive long enough to dry. Zooming out, this museum show and Museum Visit are the moment overpainted photos broke containment, the touch of the Richter’s hand, at scale. I want to watch him make them almost as much as I hate to watch Damien Hirst wander listlessly among an acre of tables, splattering paint across 1,000 sheets that get turned into a Heni Edition.
And here I thought that Gerhard Richter’s critique of the art market by making an offset print in an open edition was surpassed only by his using the prints as note paper. Claudio Santambrogio is much better than I at deciphering Richter’s handwriting, and he figured out the entire note Richter wrote to his dealer August Haseke in November 1969 when he finally delivered the first half of his 1967 open edition, Blattecke. And it is a whole new art direction casting its shadow:
Lieber August, Hier sind heute endlich 101 Stück (Nr 286-386). Jetzt liegen noch ca. 350 Stück hier; zu Deiner Information. Ich bin so erkältet, dass ich die 101 Stück gut signieren konnte. Ich habe mich bemüht, die Viren gleichmäßig über die Blätter zu verteilen. (Die nächsten 50 hoffe ich mit etwas schickeren Viren infiltrieren zu können, vielleicht Tollwut oder so was). Eine ganz neue Kunstrichtung wirft ihre Schatten. Alle gute Euch herzliche Grüße Dein Gerhard
Dear August, Here are finally 101 pieces today (nos. 286-386). Now there are still about 350 pieces here; for your information. I have such a cold, I could sign 101 pieces. I have tried to distribute the viruses evenly over the sheets. (I hope to infiltrate the next 50 with some fancier viruses, maybe rabies or something). A whole new art direction is casting its shadow. All the best to you best regards Your Gerhard
This is not what I envisioned when I mentioned a Felix-like stack, and yet the shadow is cast.
[week later update: these notes and additional related material are now in the Richter Archive in Dresden. Apparently it took Richter three years to work his way through signing the first 739 Blattecke.]
no. 555/739+ of Gerhard Richter’s Blattecke, 1967, sold by a consumer in 2024 at Christie’s
Happy belated Blattecke Tag to all who celebrate. 6.2.67, Februrary 6th, 1967, the date Gerhard Richter signed on most of the 739 examples of Blattecke (Sheet Corner) [Ed. CR 11], the 1967 offset print edition based on a full-scale photo of a little 1965 painting, Umgeschlagenes Blatt (Turned Sheet) [CR 70-2], which was 24 x 18 cm.
739 seems like a pretty big edition already, but Richter conceived of the edition as open and unlimited. How open and how unlimited is not clear. Richter’s website only mentions two additional examples, one dated 15.5.97, bringing the total to 741.
Gerhard Richter, Blattecke, 1967/2017, 232 x 174mm, offset print on cardboard, selling at Grisebach
Well, another post-’67 Blattecke just turned up for sale at Grisebach with a date of 11.2.2017. But in addition to the date, Richter puts the edition number on the corner of the turned up page. So by February 2017, the count was at 906.
Still from Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, 2019-24, by Gerhard Richter & Corinna Belz, as introduced by Gagosian for an upcoming immersive installation in Rome, Dec. 2024.
As we try to make sense of wtf happened, and what the future holds, let me try to bring some clarity. As fields and factions drunk on their own importance clamor for dominance, let me try to bring a shared understanding.
So far there have been computer animations based on two Gerhard Richter paintings. They have followed the slicing and mirroring mathematical process of the artist’s Strip series (2009-2013). Richter provided the image to and they were made by filmmaker Corinna Belz. They have been accompanied by music commissioned from multiple composers.
The project having its “gallery debut” next month, which Gagosian Rome is pleased to announce, Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version (2019–24), is of the second painting, Abstraktes Bild (CR 946-3), from 2016. It is, thought, the first to be presented as an immersive installation in film and sound, and the first to be sold, in an edition of eight. What is it, and how did it come to be?
I watched Corinna Belz’s documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting today, thinking that the artist hard at work in his studio would clear my head, or at least distract me.
Then I was overwhelmed anew by an exchange with Belz as Richter is sorting through stacks of old photographs. As Richter held a snapshot of his middle-aged parents, Belz asked, “You left Dresden, East Germany, in 1961. Did you ever see them again?”
“No, never.” Richter replied. “I was a recognized refugee. A certified political refugee. And it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t get a permit…a travel permit for the East.
“Not until later, 1987, when I had an exhibition there. Then, with the ambassador, suddenly everything was possible.
“But by then they were all dead.”
“Did you realize in the 60s that you would never see them again?”
“No. Absolutely not. You think things will change and it won’t last. You don’t think people will grow old and die. When you leave them, they’re young.”
I knew this was here; I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, and it inexorably changed the way I thought of Richter’s relationship to photographs, his subjects, and the arc of his entire project. A young artist becomes a refugee when his war-ravaged country splits apart, and he never sees his family again is not the Richter origin story we were used to. And Richter lost in sadness as his answers to the questions linger in his silence is not the icy master of critical detachment we’ve been taught.
But today, my ache over the career of this artist built on personal trauma that unfurled across the shifting fascist and imperial politics of the 20th century was overshadowed by my dread of the future. Because part of my processing today involved replaying with unwanted, fresh intensity the idea of leaving, of fleeing.
The questions of where? when? how? land differently than they did even yesterday. But at least I asked them. Am I ready to never see my parents again? wasn’t even a question I’d thought of. Neither, it turns out, did Richter.
On Kawara family snapshots, from “From the Desk of Anne Rorimer,” curated by Alan Longino
Here are snapshots of On Kawara’s family attending Gerhard Richter’s New Year’s party.
Installation view of “From the Desk of Anne Rorimer: On, Anne, On,” scr via ig/alan_longino
They were included in, “From the Desk of Anne Rorimer: On, Anne, On,” an exhibition staged over a series of weekends in Apr-May 2024 in what looks like a student lounge at the University of Chicago. The material was taken down every night so it wouldn’t disappear. It was the fourth and final show of Longino, IAH, a curatorial project by post-war Japanese Art History graduate student Alan Longino. Longino’s idea was a show focused on an art historian, and Rorimer gamely opened her lifetime of files and correspondence, and archive of artist interactions to him.
More than most artists, Kawara’s work was so intertwined with the medium of interaction, correspondence, and daily activity, and the professional and personal ephemera give glimpses of life beyond the edges of his practice.
Screenshot from “A Conversation with Anne Rorimer on Blinky Palermo, On Kawara and Lawrence Weiner, 29 June 2024 at Dia Beacon via youtube
Rorimer began working with Kawara in 1979, when she included him in the 79th American Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Judging by the age of Kawara’s daughter in the lower snapshot, the party would probably have been in the late 1980s. A more intrepid soul than I might deduce the year from the date formats of paintings produced around the holidays. Or it’s on that pink envelope. [update: which, that Sojourner Truth stamp was issued in 1986.] Or just ask Rorimer.
Of Longino, IAH, there is a text by Calvin Lee on Longino’s Google Drive, but the most thorough documentation of the show for the moment is Longino’s Instagram. I was stunned and saddened to learn Longino, 36 and at the very beginning of his career, passed away from cancer in July, barely a week after Rorimer & Carter’s conversation.
oilcloth concept roundup, [clockwise from upper left]: but which Guyton? Richter Strip; a Rothko; Sturtevant’s—or any, really—Felix candy carpet
Yesterday on the good social media, I floated an idea about custom-printing an oilcloth for our table instead of stalemating over off-the-roll options. When I realized custom was even an option, my mind went first to Guyton/Walker, probably because tables, but also because their poppin’ designs feel like riffs on the most garish tropical oilcloth patterns out there already.
But then it occurred to me, what is a Wade Guyton painting but an artisanal and auratic, custom-printed textile? Which one would be best as a tablecloth? If process is the determinant, Gerhard Richter’s Strip paintings are also printed. But what isn’t these latter days of the flatbed picture plane?
I had the Felix Gonzalez-Torres catalogue raisonné out, and its all-over cover photos of candy suddenly felt like the perfect combination of representation and abstraction, object and pattern. But what color?
The Gonzalez-Torres image universe spilled out before me. Bead curtain? Death by Gun? [oof.] The dark surface of the sea? A bird in a cloudy sky? Black with a couple of lines of biography and historic events printed along one edge? Then I realized I already had a solution. Or at least an option.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (For Parkett 39), 1994, ed. 1/84 sold in Fall 2023 at the auction of a complete set of Parkett editions at Van Ham, Berlin
Sure, we could print the entire image of footprints in the sand from “Untitled” (For Parkett 39). Or, we could use the eight screenprinted panels of the 3×7-meter billboard edition separately. Except they are mostly square, around 160 x 170 cm, each, plus some border/overlap. So on their own, they don’t fit our rectangular table. They would need to be pasted together in a vertical pair. Do they need to be laminated? Coated? Thrown over with a clear vinyl tablecloth like at Grandma’s? Beyond unworkable, it feels wrong. [lmao as if the whole idea isn’t bad enough.] I’ve taken my Parkett billboard sheets out like twice, and that billboard stock is thick; they are not your crafty mama’s butcher paper.
“Upper right corner bumped”: Gerhard Richter, Spiegel, 1986, 21 [or 20.5] x 29.8 cm, ed. 89/100 [or unique] Lot 97 at Lempertz
Sometimes after all the relentless perfection what you really want is a Gerhard Richter Spiegel that has really seen some stuff. You just know this one has never spent a minute of its life in a box in a freeport, and shouldn’t that be a premium instead of an 80% discount?
![gerhard richter skull painting from 1983, a soft blur painting of a skull in profile sitting on a dark table in a starkly lit space, black and white zones in the background that meet as if in a corner at the top of the skull. the first in a series of skull paintings richter made, he kept this one for himself, but made a photo edition in 2017, for the masses [sic]](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/richter-skull-1983.webp)
