Portraits

Portraits gathers Gerhard Richter's paintings of the human face into a single survey, tracking one of the most persistent threads running through his otherwise restless body of work.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Museumsberg Flensburg, the catalogue reproduces portraits spanning Richter's career, from the blurred, photo-derived likenesses of family members and public figures made in the 1960s to later, more painterly and abstracted treatments of the face. Essays by Stefan Gronert and Hubertus Butin examine how Richter has used the portrait to interrogate photography, memory, and the limits of painted representation, rather than to record likeness for its own sake. Hatje Cantz published the 254-page hardcover catalogue in 2006.

Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, is among the most influential painters of the postwar period, moving between photorealism, abstraction, and conceptual strategies without settling into any one of them. The portrait recurs across that range as a private counterpoint to his large abstract and history paintings, and this volume is one of the few to isolate it as a subject in its own right.