Title: Atlas
Author: Gerhard Richter
Publisher: Distributed Art Publishers, 1997
Illustrations by Gerhard Richter, Introduction by Helmut Friedel, Edited by Helmut
Friedel and Ulrich Wilmes ; 390 pages with over 5000 photographs, drawings, exhibition
design sketches and other works hundreds of color images.
Atlas represents the core of Gerhard Richter’s aesthetic. As an multi-edition, organic
book, continually growing and changing, its original intention was to serve as a map
to his diverse and amorphous artistic practice. As a member of the fi rst German post-
war generation, much of Richter’s output deals with the struggle for cultural, personal,
and political identity after the second world war. Richter has attributed his perpetually
morphing approach to painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, and diagrams as a
symptom of this pervasive cultural trauma. Atlas is essentially a map through his complex
working process and extensive body of work. It has been said that the book “reveals
the mind of an artist sifting through his material – selecting, marking and altering images
then transferring them onto canvas.” Includes a Catalogue Raisonné of the sheets
and concordance to Richter’s reference numbers. Also includes a detailed exhibition
history of panels from the Atlas with black and white installation photographs and
panel layout diagram illustrations.
