Gerhard Richter

I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality.
—Gerhard Richter

Gagosian is pleased to present editioned works by Gerhard Richter spanning fifty years.

Throughout his distinguished career, Richter has remained at the forefront of contemporary abstraction and image-making, embracing haptic process and technological advancements in equal measure and harnessing found imagery in groundbreaking ways. Editions are a central feature of his practice. He modifies details and sometimes entire compositions from his oeuvre, producing artworks that are simultaneously self-referential and new. Divergent in medium, scale, and style, the editions mirror Richter’s mercurial artistic processes and explore the dynamic relationship between source image and pictorial representation.

Many of Richter’s prints are based on personal photographs. He produced his earliest edition Hund (Dog) (1965) by sweeping a paintbrush across a still-damp screenprint depicting the family dog; blurred with a visible texture from the brush hairs, the resulting image is a print that references both painting and photography. Richter also rephotographed newspaper illustrations, altering them to simulate the appearance of industrial print media. In Flugzeug I (Airplane I) (1966), he purposely misaligned the screenprint’s two layers of gray ink, mimicking the errors common to off-register printing. Other early works, such as the offset print Elizabeth II (1966), were intentionally printed with shifted plates to create a moiré pattern.