Gerhard Richter – 1025 Colors (1974)

Louisiana poster with the work, 1025 Colors (1974), by the German artist, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932). 1025 Farben was featured in Louisiana's 2005 exhibition, Gerhard Richter—Image After Image, and is today a major work in Louisiana's collection.

Few artists range as widely and are as diverse and different in their work and use of the countless possibilities of the image as Gerhard Richter. His starting point is often photography. Not because Richter wanted to be a photographer, but photography as a starting point for imaging.

Quite ordinary color cards became a direct inspiration for Gerhard Richter throughout the 60s and 70s. Richter's color field paintings belong to the part of his work where he is interested in constructing images.

At first he used the color cards as a template, just like with the photos he had already worked intensively with. But gradually he developed a system, based on the principle of consistent coincidence—which also resonates here in 1025 Farben.

Incidentally, this also applies to a much later work, the almost infinitely long digital print, Strip, from 2013, where stripes have replaced fields as a motif in a systematization of colors. Today, Strip is also in Louisiana's collection.