Painting--its principles, boundaries, and possibilities--is the central theme of the extensive body of work by Gerhard Richter (*1932 in Dresden), an oeuvre has been characterized by stylistic contrasts since the very beginning.

This elegant volume of color plates featuring profound essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Beate Söntgen, and Gregor Stemmrich focuses on the artist's abstract paintings, which have comprised a dominant portion of his collective works since the eighties. The book does not trace the development of form and content in the paintings, but concentrates instead on the paintings that thematically comprise a homogenous body of work. It is based on the assertion that Richter's abstract paintings are the results of various painterly processes that are not guided in a particular direction by a content-related precept. The featured paintings were produced between 1986 and 2006 and place emphasis on large-format paintings characterized by a prodigious painterly density.