Gerhard Richter: Landscapes

No genre has fascinated Gerhard Richter so consistently throughout his career as that of landscape. Ever since his softly overpainted Views of Corsica series of 1968-69, the artist has revisited and reprised its possibilities, creating black-and-white townscapes based on newspaper picture and amateur photographs, mountain and park scenes with heavy impasto, illusionistic seascapes in subtly gradated tones and paintings worked with abstract overpainting. Frequently these paintings interrupt or quietly sabotage the transcendent horizon of the Romantic landscape, but the image presented is not exactly ironized as in other paintings of Richter's.