Atlas

Atlas is Gerhard Richter's ongoing archive of source photographs, sketches, and printed images, mounted on panels and periodically published in book form. It stands as both a private working index and a major work in Richter's own right.

Richter began assembling Atlas in the early 1960s. He first exhibited it in 1972, at the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht, under the title Atlas der Fotos und Skizzen, with 315 parts. The project kept expanding and was later shown in full at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1989, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1990, and the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1995. It now comprises roughly 4,000 photographs, reproductions, and cut-out details of photographs and illustrations, arranged across some 600 panels.

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden) has worked across both photo-based figurative painting and dense abstract painting since the early 1960s, after leaving East Germany for the West in 1961. Atlas sits alongside this two-track practice as an open-ended, unedited archive of the photographic and printed material Richter has collected and organized over six decades.