Gerhard Richter and the Technological Condition of Painting

Gerhard Richter and the Technological Condition of Painting argues that Richter’s appropriation of science and technology is the red thread that runs through his career as a painter from 1960 to the present. The central purpose of this book is to uncover how the mediation of science and technology has shaped Richter’s engagement with four canonical genres of Western painting in the light of a corresponding technological mediation. Chapter 1 is concerned with Richter’s interest in the epistemic value of photography, and its influence on his conception of realism in the portraits of the 1960s. Chapter 2 considers the contested status of mass media photography as historical evidence with regards to Richter’s cycle of history paintings documenting the Baader-Meinhof Group. Chapter 3 explores the influence of biological processes on Richter’s use of artistic chance in the overpainted photographs and the landscape paintings. Chapter 4 considers Richter’s use of images obtained by electron microscopy as sources for his abstract paintings, and makes aesthetic and political analogies between the visualisation of structures at the atomic level and ornamental abstraction. The book concludes on a coda that offers new historical evidence that the digital had informed Richter’s imagination as early as the 1960s, confirming his position as a pioneer of the technological condition of painting.