With a career spanning more than sixty years, the renowned painter Gerhard Richter is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book celebrates the artist’s continued dedication to experimentation and innovation.


The Abstract Pictures were created when Richter, a few years ago, poured colored enamel paints onto a glass plate and allowed them to flow into one another in order to take shapes. He then captured these ephemeral moments with his camera and selected 100 of these “pictures” for inclusion in the book alongside equally abstract texts formed by randomly generated letter combinations.


An artwork of its own, this intimate volume inspires both close looking and a beautiful interpretation of abstraction.

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) was born in Dresden, Germany. He studied art at the Dresden Hochschule für Bildende Künste from 1951 to 1956, with mural painting as his concentration. In 1959, he visited documenta II, held in Kassel, Germany, an experience that inspired him to alter his artistic trajectory. After his escape from East Germany in 1961, he completed a second course of study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. There, he united with his fellow students Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg, and Manfred Kuttner to collectively form the short-lived “Capitalist Realism” group.