Gerhard Richter: Abstraktes Bild 825-11: 69 Details

Abstraktes Bild 825-11: 69 Details is Gerhard Richter's 1996 artist's book built entirely from one 1995 abstract painting, isolating 69 close-up details of its surface as individual full-page plates.

The frontispiece reproduces the complete canvas, catalogue raisonné no. 825-11, before the book moves through 69 numbered details cropped from that same surface and printed full-bleed in color. An afterword by Hans Ulrich Obrist, translated into English by Catherine Schelbert, closes the 152-page volume. Scalo published this English-language edition in Zurich in 1996; a German edition appeared the same year from Insel Verlag as No. 1166 in its Insel-Bücherei series.

Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, has spent his career moving between photo-based painting and open-ended abstraction. This book turns that method inward: rather than painting from an external photograph, it uses photographic reproduction to generate 69 new images from a single existing canvas. The library also holds Painting After All, the catalogue for Richter's 2020 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Landscape, a 2020 Hatje Cantz monograph on landscape across his work.