Gerhard Richter: Images of an Era

Among German painter Gerhard Richter’s best-known works are his large-scale paintings based on―and sometimes applied directly to―photographs. A transplant to West Germany mere months before the erection of the Berlin Wall, Richter sought to understand and represent his new environment through a series of paintings from black-and-white photos culled from newspapers, books, and magazines. These paintings marked a new phase in Richter’s remarkable career.?Providing new insight into these complex photo-derived works, Gerhard Richter: Images of an Era presents fifty of the artist’s works that cumulatively form an image of Richter’s Germany―its hopes and dreams, its new possibilities and memories of the oppressive past. Among the works included here are the fifteen controversial panels from the 18. Oktober 1977 series, which, painted from press photographs, depict moments in the lives and deat

?Ortrud Westheider is director of the Bucerius Kunst Forum, an exhibit hall in Hamburg, where Michael Philipp is curator.

?