‘Painting like nature’: Chance and the Landscape in Gerhard Richter's Overpainted Photographs

Abstract

© Association of Art Historians 2016. This essay demonstrates that Gerhard Richter’s overpainted photographs make a critical intervention within the context of a return to fi guration and the landscape genre in West German painting of the 1980s. It situates the overpainted photographs within an alternative understanding of chance as natural process, and argues that, by reappropriating a former tradition of randomness at a time when Germany’s past was resurfacing in political and cultural discourses, Richter redefi nes the landscape against various ideological recuperations of the genre, from the Third Reich to neo-expressionism.