Gerhard Richter: Atlas Vol.I-IV

Gerhard Richter began mounting parts of his extensive collection of pictorial material, the pieces that he considered important, on pieces of cardboard with sizes ranging from 50 × 65 to 73.5 × 51.7 cm more than fifty years ago, with the desire of creating order and clarity: Private photos, clippings from newspapers and magazines, sketches, drawings, construction plans, room designs, collages, painted-over photographs as well as draft versions and paintings. richter soon neglected chronology–his real interest was in iconographical and typological order. as a ‘work in progress,’ Atlas soon developed into an independent Gesamtkunstwerk, mirroring biographical and historical facts–an artistic cosmos of great autonomy and source of all of his thought and creation. After the publication of war cut in 2004, the artist’s book became an important genre in Richter’s work. a series of autonomous artists’ books then followed in quick succession. It was only natural that by 2012 he had begun to consider not only reproducing the atlas, but rearranging it as a book. his decision to show all of the plates at a scale of 1:2 makes the monumental archive, with more than five thousand images, visible in all its detail for the first time. numerous small-format photos, which are hard to appreciate in exhibitions but often contain important pictorial information, are now viewable.