‘Gerhard Richter: Landschaften’ by Jason Rosenfeld
July 22, 2026
Gerhard Richter’s exquisite landscapes fall somewhere in the middle: camera-derived but not photorealist, personally experienced scenes marked by irresolution and level tonalities, with surfaces that retain legibility but deny clarity. This largely chronological show features twenty-six oils in four galleries dating from 1965 to 2005, when he moved away from the genre. Many are, unsurprisingly, technically intricate. Seestück (Gegenlicht) of 1969 in gallery one mimics the combination printing in Gustave Le Gray’s composite ocean photographs of the 1850s, wherein he used separate plates for the sky and the sea in order to control the lighting. In this 6 ½ foot square painting derived from two photos, Richter produced astonishingly backlit clouds in the broad sky as in El Greco’s View of Toledo (ca. 1599–1600), with a Turnerian sunburst at upper right, and a swelling illuminated ocean surface with reflections that do not quite line up with the solar entity above. It is the depopulated Northern European sublime, its format and glow reclaimed from Mark Rothko’s signature works. At distance it resolves into defined imagery, but up close the brushwork is blended and edges elided, thwarting focus. Read more at The Brooklyn Rail.
