David Zwirner is pleased to present Gerhard Richter’s celebrated photorealist landscape paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s, which will be paired with a considered selection of works from his Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings, 1976–2017) series. Taking place at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York, Gerhard Richter: Landschaften will feature loans from significant private and museum collections, as well as works lent from the artist’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 while eschewing traditional notions of the aesthetic sublime. In the following years, he continued to create landscape paintings based on 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 in this exhibition, these two aspects of Richter’s oeuvre will together illustrate the artist’s 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.
