In the 1980s Richter began squeezing pigment abstractly across canvases he had already painted in his photorealist manner, suggesting that representation and abstraction are merely interchangeable codes. More recently, he has made a number of small works that state this proposition with remarkable clarity: he squeezed paint directly onto original photographs-his own color snapshots of his art, his travels, and members of his family. These modest pictures neatly sum up the artist's problem: how to borrow photography's poignant time-bound veracity without deserting his calling as a painter.
