Gerhard Richter: 100 Abstract Pictures

Less a book about works than a work in book form: one hundred photographs of enamel poured on glass, chosen by Gerhard Richter and set against passages of randomly generated letters.

Richter made the images by pouring coloured enamel onto a glass plate and letting the paints run into one another, then photographing the shapes at the moment before they settled or dissolved. From that pool he selected a hundred and fixed them in sequence across 208 pages, each plate faced by text that is abstract in the same way the pictures are - letter combinations generated at random, legible as type but not as language. David Zwirner Books published the volume in 2023 in a small hardcover format, 23 by 16 centimetres, with all 100 images in colour. Nothing here is documentation of paintings held elsewhere; the pictures exist for and as the book.

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden) has worked for more than sixty years across photo-painting, colour charts, grey monochromes, glass and the squeegee abstractions, and has used the book as a medium in its own right in projects such as Patterns and War Cut, where a single image is subdivided and re-sequenced until the printed sequence becomes the work.