Gerhard Richter's Atlas is on show until 14 March. The walls of the gallery are closely tiled with groups of framed cards of a couple of standard sizes. On them are mounted photographs, drawings, sketches and cuttings, mostly in rows like the illustrations in an encyclopedia of garden plants. These panels constitute an archive, displayed more or less in chronological order, of the sources of Richter's work, from 1962 to the present. The most common primary unit is a colour print of the kind you get from your local photo shop. Groups of almost identical snaps of a single subject (a burnt-out house, a sunset, a bunch of flowers, a woman, a baby, trains on the same stretch of line, mountain landscapes, a fire) are mounted together. Some, set close to one another, make complete fields of colour, others are spaced out. On the gallery walls this flow of colour is interspersed with groups of black and white images.

LRB 8 January 2004 | PDF Download