By Andrew Russeth 8/30/12 2:00pm

Look at This!

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Patterns

Gerhard Richter’s ‘Patterns’ Book

This special edition of Gallerist’s “Look at This!” presents selections from Gerhard Richter’s 2011 book Patterns, which is officially being released by Distributed Art Publishers tomorrow.

To generate the images in the 488-page book, Mr. Richter took one of his 1990 abstract paintings and digitally dissected it. First he cut it into two separate strips, mirrored them and repeated them across the length of the page to produce two hallucinogenic waves of abstraction. Then he cut the painting into four strips and followed the same process, repeating each mirrored strip so that each of the four final resulting images are the same length. Next came divisions of eight, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048 and 4,096. Works from that last division are simply straight horizontal lines of color, each one generated by minuscule cuts of the painting. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 9:07am

Art

A postcard for a performance by Michael Smith at Electronic Arts Intermix. (Courtesy EAI)

Bob Nickas on Today’s Art World

Following in the tradition of its Ice Cream and Creamier books, Phaidon just recently released another hulking contemporary art survey. This one is called Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks—the works are selected by eight top-flight curators like Bice Curiger, Massimiliano Gioni and Okwui Enwezor. It’s a pleasurable anthology, with some nice quirks. But more on that another time. We just wanted to share this tiny excerpt from a roundtable discussion among the participants and Phaidon editor Craig Garrett. Read More