EVENT DETAILS

Kate Albers, "Gerhard Richter's Atlas as atlas"

The UCI Department of Art History presents
Gerhard Richter's Atlas as atlas
Kate Albers
University of Arizona

In 1972, the German artist Gerhard Richter debuted what has since become a
sprawling, career-long magnum opus and so-called public archive, known as
Atlas. For the past forty years, the artist has continued to add to the work, which is
now composed of over 6,000 individual images. The collected panels interweave
fragments of a national and international history with personal family snapshots,
as well as images from his professional work, in the form of sketches, proposals,
and source photographs for many of his paintings. Yet despite the work’s title, it
has rarely been considered as a kind of atlas itself. This talk will situate Richter’s
Atlas within the context of both scientific and cartographic atlases, looking closely
at the work’s various manifestations to assess how it both engages with and
departs from the structural complexities and intellectual certainties of the atlas
form.

Free and open to the public.
For more information, please contact arthis@uci.edu.