Gerhard Richter: Life and Work in Painting Thinking is Painting

Gerhard Richter: Life and Work is Armin Zweite’s monograph on Richter, tracing the painter from his training in East Germany across six decades of work.

Zweite, an art historian, follows the career phase by phase: the black-and-white photo paintings, the color charts, the gray paintings, the glass and mirror pieces, the landscapes, portraits and still lifes, and the large abstractions. He also covers two of Richter’s long-running projects, Atlas, an ongoing collection of photographs and newspaper clippings, and October 18, 1977, paintings about members of a German left-wing terrorist group. The plates reproduce more than 250 works, among them Ten Large Color-Charts (1966), Annunciation after Titian (1973), Skull with Candle (1983) and Double Gray (2014). The English edition of 2020 is a 480-page linen-bound hardcover with a jacket and 413 color illustrations. The German original is titled Leben und Werk. Das Denken ist beim Malen das Malen.

Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, trained in the German Democratic Republic, moved to West Germany in 1962 and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz. Zweite has directed several museums, including the Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and has written on Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Richard Serra.