RICHTER, Gerhard - Atlas

"Photography-related artist Gerhard RICHTER began mounting parts of his extensive collection of pictorial material, the pieces that he considered important, on cardboard in sizes between 50 × 65 and 73.5 × 51.7 cm more than 50 years ago with the desire of creating order and clarity: private photos, cuttings from newspapers and magazines, sketches, drawings, construction plans, room designs, collages, over-painted 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,' the 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 artist's 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 5,000 images, visible in all its details for the first time. Numerous small-format photos, which are hard to appreciate in exhibitions but often contain important pictorial information, are now viewable."