In the vast and endless sea of Twitter, where information travels at the speed of light, it happens sometimes to stop and pick up a small pearl from the sea floor. Gerhard Richter’s account has posted a link to his website — impressively efficient — where you can see a video about his famous Atlas. Produced since the early ’60s, these works are a sort of panel on which the German artist has pasted images, fragments and all kind of cuttings from his own private history to global events, up to pornography images and landscapes. A kind of personal visual “seismography.”
Part of this vast project is on view at Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau in Dresden until April 22. Curators Dietmar Elger and Helmut Friedel give their interpretation of the work in the video, offering some installation views of the exhibition. Richter appears just for few seconds and says about Atlas: “It is just documentation. No, it is not a work of art, I don’t think so. It might be interesting, but…”. Then he shrugs. Provocations aside, the video drags us along the website, where – in addition to the paintings – all the panels of Atlas are visible: thousands and thousands of images to back up the career of one of the most prominent living painters.
