Coda: Towards Digital Painting

This Coda offers a historical genealogy of Richter’s interest in digital technology as an artistic tool or medium, a point that has so far remained uncharted in the literature on the artist. It opens on a consideration of Frieder Nake’s algorithmic work Homage to Gerhard Richter (2018) to suggest that Richter’s production anticipated those explorations of the medium that have recently culminated in digital painting. This chapter deploys new historical evidence that the digital had informed Richter’s artistic imagination as early as the 1960s, confirming his position as a pioneer of the technological condition of painting.