Overpainted Photographs

Overpainted Photographs accompanied an exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s small oil paintings made directly on commercial photographic prints, a group of works that is rarely shown in public.

Richter often works from photographs, but here he paints on the prints themselves. The publisher says the overpaintings began with accidental spots and traces of paint on the source material, and that similar overpaintings already appear in his Atlas. Nearly all of them are in private collections. The exhibition ran at Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen from 17 October 2008 to 18 January 2009 and at the Centre de la photographie Genève from 29 January to 29 March 2009. The book has 392 pages and 496 photographs and is clothbound, with English text. Markus Heinzelmann edited it, and the texts are by Heinzelmann, Uwe M. Schneede, Siri Hustvedt and Botho Strauß.