Gerhard Richter: Landschaften

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s celebrated photorealist landscape paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s, which are displayed alongside a considered selection of works from his series of Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings, 1976–2017). On view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York, Gerhard Richter: Landschaften is curated by David Zwirner and David Leiber, a partner at the gallery, in close collaboration with the artist. The exhibition features loans from significant private and museum collections, including paintings that were recently on view in the artist’s acclaimed retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2025–2026, as well as works lent from Richter’s personal collection.

Richter began to engage the subject of landscape almost six decades ago in the late 1960s, creating atmospheric compositions based on snapshots from his travels. These paintings evoke art-historical precedents—particularly the work of Caspar David Friedrich—while eschewing traditional notions of the aesthetic sublime. Over the following years, Richter continued to paint landscapes from photographic sources, often working on them at the same time as his Abstract Paintings so that each body of work might inform the underlying pictorial concerns expressed by the other. Displayed in dialogue through a chronological series of rooms each dedicated to a period of the artist’s career, these abstract and representational aspects of Richter’s oeuvre together illustrate his enduring investigation into the nature of images and the perception of reality—how it is personally interpreted, mediated by the external world, and visually portrayed through painting.