ΒΟΟΚ: Gerhard Richter-Foricano, David Zwirner Books

With a career spanning from the 1960s to the present, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) is widely celebrated as one of the most important artists of his generation. He has pursued a diverse and influential practice characterized by a decades-long commitment to painting and its formal and conceptual possibilities. The artist has consistently probed the relationship between painting and photography, engaging a variety of styles and innovative techniques in a complex repositioning of genres. Gerhard Richter’s newest facsimile-like artist’s book “Foricano” by David Zwirner Books is focused on a single work comprising twenty-six drawings. In this new work, Richter combines various elements from a limited set of forms and techniques—meandering lines, broad tonal planes applied with angled strokes of graphite, and passages of smudging, hatching, and erasure—thereby uniting choice and chance in an infinitely generative process. The suite of works on paper from 2023 encapsulates and refines the fundamental principles that have consistently defined Richter’s artistic journey. Reproduced at actual size, the drawings encourage in-depth observation and inspire a compelling reimagining of abstraction.-Dimitris Lempesis