Gerhard Richter Libri

La pratica quotidiana della pittura è uno dei più bei libri mai scritti da un artista, un'importante testimonianza sull'arte degli ultimi 40 anni da parte di uno dei suoi più grandi interpreti. In sette anni di lavoro l'artista e il curatore hanno raccolto in questo libro (l'edizione italiana va ad aggiungersi a quella tedesca, inglese, americana e francese) documenti che abbracciano tutta la carriera di Richter, dalle lettere personali alle riflessioni inviate ad altri artisti, dalle risposte ai critici ai brani apparsi in varie riviste nel corso del tempo. La versione italiana, inoltre, è stata arricchita con l'ultima intervista di Gerhard Richter, quella rilasciata a Robert Storr (direttore della prossima Biennale di Venezia) in occasione della sua grande retrospettiva al MoMA di New York nel 2001. Non mancano le immagini in questa collezione di testi, ottanta fotografie che provengono dall'archivio personale dell'artista.

This monumental and comprehensive publication maps the ideas, processes, life and times of one of the most important painters of our time. Conceived and closely edited by Gerhard Richter himself, Atlas cuts straight to the heart of the artist’s thinking, collecting more than 5,000 photographs, drawings and sketches that he has compiled or created since the moment of his creative breakthrough in 1962. Year by year, the images closely parallel the subjects of Richter’s paintings, revealing the orderly but open-ended analysis that has been so central to his art. Offering invaluable insight into Richter’s working process, this encyclopedic new edition, which completely revises and updates the rare, out-of-print 1997 edition and includes 147 additional plates, features 780 multi-image panels, each reproduced full page and in full color. Richter redefined the terms of contemporary painting as he looked to photography for a way to release painting from the political and symbolic burdens of Socialist Realism and Abstract Expressionism. From pictures of family and friends to images from the mass media, Richter’s photographs--sometimes found, sometimes original--have provided the basis for many of his paintings, often re-emerging in a luminous, monochromatic palette, and falling ambiguously between documentary and historical painting.

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 nonstandard anthology of his oeuvre. Following a short introduction to his early work, which features pictures long held 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 portrays his young wife Sabine as a Madonna-and-child. 100 Pictures is an extraordinary document of contemporary art, finally back in print.

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) is one of the most highly regarded of contemporary artists, and his series of 15 paintings known as October 18, 1977, is one of the 20th century's most famous works on a political theme. It commemorates the day on which three young German radicals, members of the militant Baader-Meinhof group, were found dead in a Stuttgart prison; they were pronounced suicides, but many people suspected that they had been murdered. Richter's paintings, created 11 years after this traumatic event, are among the most challenging works of the artist's career.These hauntingly powerful images, derived from newspaper and police photography, are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and will be on view beginning in September 2000 as part of the MoMA2000 series of exhibitions. In this book, Robert Storr provides necessary political background to the series, but his approach is art historical, offering insight into the complexities of "history painting" in the modern era.

Born in Dresden in 1932, Gerhard Richter studied wall-painting at the socialist Dresdner Akademie, before settling in Dusseldorf in 1961. It was here that he began painting from photographic sources, a method which by his own admission allowed him to make a stand against the academies and the oppressive prototypes of the time, from which he had to free himself to find his own innovative creative style.

Gerhard Richter is widely seen as one of the most important painters at work in the world today. Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932, he left for the West in 1961, settling in Dusseldorf, where he held his first exhibition in 1963. He has exhibited internationally for the last five decades, including retrospectives in New York, Paris and Dusseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne. As the artist draws near to his eightieth birthday in 2012, Tate Modern in collaboration with the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, is staging a major retrospective exhibition. Exhibition: Tate Modern, London 6 October 2011 - 8 January 2012 / Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin February - April 2012 / Centre Pompidou, Paris 6 June - 24 September 2012

Gerhard Richter's book explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer.

"An exploration of the idea of the world in art (both an image of the world that has perished, and another opened up by the artwork) as revealed through a number of seminal philosophical thinkers as well as through assorted modes of aesthetic production, including painting, film, photography, poetry and music"-- Provided by publisher