Gerhard Richter: Landschaften

Gerhard Richter began painting landscapes in the late 1960s following a formative visit to Corsica, using snapshots as compositional foundations for atmospheric seascapes that engage art-historical precedents while resisting traditional notions of the sublime. His process involves manipulating photographs—sometimes collaging multiple images—and translating them through gestural brushwork that ranges from energetic tangles to sfumato haze, deliberately blurring the boundary between representation and abstraction. Since formalizing his Abstract Paintings series in 1976, Richter has developed landscapes and abstractions in tandem, with each series informing the other; some abstractions began as overpainted landscapes, while others evoke landscape through title alone. His work presents detached, often blurred views of expansive natural subjects—icebergs, volcanoes, mountains, open waters—that subtly complicate how landscape can be visually and culturally understood.