Gerhard Richter. 100 Selfportraits

For the subscription edition of Gerhard Richter’s (born 1932) Schriften und Interviews, published by Insel Verlag in 1993 in an edition of 100 copies, the artist drew a small “self-portrait” in pencil on the back of a portrait photograph at the front of the book. Enthused by this work, between September and December 1993 he produced a further 94 signed and dated self-portraits on loose sheets of paper, which are published here for the first time. Seen together as a series, Richter’s exercise becomes truly impressive: despite the consistency of conception, each instance has an individual formal and aesthetic appearance. These pencil drawings form a series of variations whose aspiration is not the gradual approach toward a perfected final outcome, but rather the serial testing of different but equally weighted possibilities of representation within limited specifications.