Gerhard Richter's Overpainted Photographs

For over 20 years, Gerhard Richter has been uniting painting and photography with an ongoing series simply titled Overpainted Photographs. I recently had the chance to sit down with the monograph, published by Hatje Cantz in February, and was taken aback by the sheer volume of work contained within. Some of my favorite of Richter's painted photographs are those in which the texture of the paint mimics, or even extracts, the texture in the photograph. As Jeff Ladd of the 5B4 blog points out:

"For many photographers the image has no surface. The illusion of photography in providing a window into which we perceive literal description and dimension by Richter's hand is now disrupted due to the addition of paint. Often a tense relationship, the results run the gamut of the surreal to the beautiful to the disturbed. It is all the more surprising that each in its perceived completeness was in essence accomplished by chance and trial and error."


4. März 92 (Piz Tremoggia) (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter


9.1.89 (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter


12.4.92 (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter


23.2.96 (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter


8.2.92 (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter