Gerhard Richter, Sils

Whenever Gerhard Richter goes to Sils, a small town in the Swiss Alps, he makes photographs, some of which he overpaints and adds to his "Atlas." Others he treats as autonomous works, as in those presented in this intimate artist's book. In the overpainted photographs, the levels of reality evident in photography are combined with those that exist in painting. However, the paired concepts prove redundant of both the realism in photographic representation and the abstraction in nonfigurative painting. The photographs reveal a parallel between both forms of painterly practice, evidence of the simultaneous existence of contradictory bodies of work in Richter's oeuvre.