Gerhard Richter Reader 1994 © Gerhard Richter Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

Tate Modern 6 October 2011  –  8 January 2012

Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective exhibition that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career.

Since the 1960s, Gerhard Richter has immersed himself in a rich and varied exploration of painting. Gerhard Richter: Panorama highlights the full extent of the artist's work, which has encompassed a diverse range of techniques and ideas. It includes realist paintings based on photographs, colourful gestural abstractions such as the squeegee paintings, portraits, subtle landscapes and history paintings.

Gerhard Richter was one of the first German artists to reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims of, the Nazi party. Continuing his historical interest, he produced the 15-part work October 18 1977 1988, a sequence of black and white paintings based on images of the Baader Meinhof group. Richter has continued to respond to significant moments in history throughout his career; the final room of the exhibition includes September 2005, a painting of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001.

Tate Modern exhibition.

Published on the occasion of Richter's major exhibition at the Tate, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is the first and most complete overview of one of the greatest artistic achievements of our times. Where previous monographs have focused on a single genre within the artist's vast output, this stunningly illustrated survey encompasses his entire oeuvre, now stretching across more than a half-century of activity, including photo-paintings, abstracts, landscapes and seascapes, portraits, glass and mirror works, sculptures, drawings and photographs. It therefore stands as the definitive portrait of Richter's colossal accomplishment to date. Alongside his celebrated abstractions, early black-and-white paintings and the photorealist depictions of candles, skulls and clouds that have become indisputable icons of modern painting, Panorama includes nearly 30 new paintings made over the past ten years, extensive comparative works, studio photographs, archival images and a substantial interview with the artist conducted by Nicholas Serota. This landmark publication is a fitting tribute to one of the world's most celebrated living artists. Buy Now.

Born in Dresden, East Germany, in 1932, Gerhard Richter migrated to West Germany in 1961, settling in Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, and where he held his first solo exhibition in 1963. Over the course of that decade, Richter helped to liberate painting from the legacy of Socialist Realism (in Eastern Germany) and Abstract Expressionism (in Western Germany and throughout Europe). He has exhibited internationally for the last five decades, with retrospectives in New York, Paris and Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne.