Gerhard Richter and the Technological Condition of Painting

Aline Guillermet uncovers Gerhard Richter’s appropriation of science and technology from 1960 to the present and shows how this has shaped the artist’s well-documented engagement with the canon of Western painting.
Through a study of Richter’s portraits, history paintings, landscapes and ornamental abstractions, Guillermet reveals the artist’s role in affirming the technological condition of painting in the second half of the twentieth century: a historical situation in which the medium and its conventions have become shaped, and to some extent transformed, by technological innovations.