If the Abstract Pictures show my reality, then the landscapes … show my yearning.1
(Gerhard Richter, 1981)
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s celebrated photorealist landscape
paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s, which are displayed alongside a considered selection of works
from his series of Abstrakte bilder (Abstract paintings, 1976–2017). On view at the gallery’s 537 West
20th Street location in New York, Gerhard Richter: landschaften is curated by David Zwirner and David
Leiber, a partner at the gallery, in close collaboration with the artist. The exhibition features loans from
significant private and museum collections, including paintings that were recently on view in the artist’s
acclaimed retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2025–2026, as well as works lent from
Richter’s personal collection.
Richter began to engage the subject of landscape almost six decades ago in the late 1960s, creating
atmospheric compositions based on snapshots from his travels. These paintings evoke art-historical
precedents—particularly the work of Caspar David Friedrich—while eschewing traditional notions of the
aesthetic sublime. Over the following years, Richter continued to paint landscapes from photographic
sources, often working on them at the same time as his Abstract paintings so that each body of work
might inform the underlying pictorial concerns expressed by the other. Displayed in dialogue through a
chronological series of rooms each dedicated to a period of the artist’s career, these abstract and
representational aspects of Richter’s oeuvre together illustrate his enduring investigation into the nature
of images and the perception of reality—how it is personally interpreted, mediated by the external
world, and visually portrayed through painting.
The earliest painting on view, Grosse sphinx von Gise (Great sphinx of Gizeh, 1965; Glenstone Museum,
Potomac, Maryland), is part of Richter’s acclaimed series of Fotobilder (Photo paintings), which are
largely based on found snapshots, postcards, and media clippings of news events and scenes from
everyday life. Depicting a photorealistic black-and-white view of the ancient Egyptian monument
accompanied by a written caption, as if excerpted from a book illustration, this painting serves as a kind
of proto-landscape; it speaks to the artist’s interrogation of the history of photography and the
collection and dissemination of images, as well as his interest in themes of travel—a topic that would
similarly inspire his subsequent landscapes and seascapes.
In 1968, following a formative visit to the French island of Corsica, Richter used the photos he had taken
on his trip as the basis for a group of large-scale square seascapes showing views of open seas framed
by cloudy skies or vast mountain ranges—marking his first in-depth engagement with the genre of
landscape. Furthering his conceptual experiments with the iterative translation and interplay of
mediums, Richter created some of these paintings—including Seestück (Gegenlicht) (Seascape
[Contre-jour], 1969; private collection), featured in the exhibition—by collaging two photographs of sea
and sky and using the resultant composite as a reference for the final work. Atmospheric and evocative,
these manipulated landscapes investigate the existence of a subjective visual reality that exceeds the
bounds of real-world perception.
Throughout the 1970s, Richter created several series depicting expansive natural views: icebergs,
volcanoes, Alpine mountains, and open waters. Whilst sharing a visual affinity with Friedrich’s Romantic
depictions of human figures dwarfed by forests and oceans, Richter’s works engender a modernized
alteration of reality that is detached from person and place and often blurred to the precipice of
unrecognition. These paintings possess a subversive undercurrent, complicating how a landscape—in
the artistic and sociopolitical sense—can be visually and culturally understood. Moreover, Richter’s
landscapes from this period led to the genesis of his earliest Abstract paintings, which evolved out of a
collage technique in which the artist pieced together painterly layers and shadows from several
photographic sources. In Richter’s words, these abstractions served as “fictive models, because they
make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.”2
Richter would return to landscapes across the 1980s and 1990s, each time depicting anonymized
locations with his signature sfumato surface treatment. Paintings such as Lichtung (Clearing, 1987) also
see him overlaying scenes of nature with abstract brushstrokes, effectively collapsing these two
fundamental pillars of his oeuvre in a single canvas. At the same time, Richter began titling some of his
Abstract Paintings after real-world objects, including Fenster (Window, 1985) and Wolken (Clouds, 1982;
The Museum of Modern Art, New York), further playing on what he identifies as the viewer’s inherent
desire to read into abstraction and create a personal understanding of the marks made therein. As
Richter once noted: “When I look out of the window … truth for me is the way nature shows itself in its
various tones, colors and proportions. That’s a truth and has its own correctness. This little slice of
nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for
my paintings.”3
Notes
1 Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1981,” in Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: text (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), p. 120.
2 Richter, “Text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982,” in Gerhard Richter: text, ibid., p. 121.
3 Richter, “Interview with Christiane Vielhaber, 1986,” ibid., p. 192.