Strip Paintings and 8 Glass Panels
Strip Paintings and 8 Glass Panels is the catalogue for Gerhard Richter's September 2012 exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. It pairs his digitally generated Strip Paintings with a sculptural work made of panes of glass.
The exhibition showed Richter's 2012 Strip Paintings alongside 6 Panes of Glass in a Rack (2002-11). Each Strip Painting began as a digital scan of Richter's 1990 canvas Abstract Painting 724-4. He fractured the image through software into thousands of vertical striations, then selected and printed a final composition. Each resulting Strip Painting is a unique work. The 56-page hardcover catalogue, printed in color, reproduces the exhibited works. It includes two essays by the art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Gerhard Richter: Glass Insurrection" and "The Chance Ornament: Painting Progress Painting Loss," addressing the glass sculpture and the Strip Paintings in turn.
The exhibition continued a dialogue between painting and glass that runs through Richter's work since the 1960s. Earlier instances include his glass and mirror pieces, the Cologne Cathedral windows, and the 4900 Colours project of 2007. As Richter told Nicolas Serota in a 2011 interview published in Gerhard Richter: Panorama: A Retrospective, "Chance is a given, unpredictable, chaotic, the basis. And we try to control that by intervening, giving form to chance, putting it to use."
