Amazon.com
Having the lovely and intimate volume Gerhard Richter: 100 Pictures in your hands is like being transported to the renowned painter's exhibition at the Carré d'Art in Nîmes. The beautifully produced book presents paintings from 1995 to 1996, an incredibly prolific time for Richter. The luscious images range from colorful abstractions with scraped and textured paint to his signature realist paintings based on photographs. A charming essay by Guy Tosatto offers a poetic explanation of Richter's work. The telling of a conversation between a mother and her whip-smart son mimics the series of mother and child paintings. Tosatto's characters discuss the nature of painting and illusion, while the portraits of Richter's wife and young child emerge in various degrees of clarity. The domestic theme continues with a number of flower paintings, including two almost identical paintings of yellow tulips, one blurry and one almost in focus, and a portrait of soft pink flowers with broken stems. --J.P. Cohen
Book Description
Concerned with the relationship between painting and the technologically mediated image of photography, 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 nontraditional anthology of his oeuvre. Following a short introduction to his early work, which features pictures long kept 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 portray his young wife Sabine as a Madonna-and-child. "100 Pictures" is an extraordinary document of contemporary art, finally back in print. "You must believe in what you do. You must be deeply committed in order to paint. Once you become obsessed your conviction becomes so deep that in the end you are able to believe that humanity can be transformed by painting. But once this passion abandons you, there is nothing left to do. At that point it is better to forget about it, for, deep down, painting is complete idiocy." --Gerhard Richter
Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Essays by Birgit Pelzer, Guy Tosatto.
Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Essays by Birgit Pelzer, Guy Tosatto.
6.75 x 8.75 in.
103 color illustrations
BACK IN PRINT
