Gerhard Richter. Wald

Gerhard Richter's artist's book Wald assembles 285 photographs that he has taken since 2005 in a deciduous forest close to Cologne. Almost all the photographs were taken during the autumn and winter months: the trees have dropped their leaves, and the terrain is often covered with dry foliage.

Gerhard Richter arranged the photographs into different types: photographs that focus on vertical tree trunks, on branches lying on the woodland’s ground, and on horizontally piled logs or on diagonally broken branches.

In contrast to the loose typology of the photographs, Gerhard Richter uses a random generator for the selection of the text. The text, deriving from Waldung - Magazin für Wald, Wandern, Wissen, No. 1/2006, a German magazine about forestry, becomes a senseless collage of words, which originally were connected to the topic forest within the magazine.