Over the past half-century, Gerhard Richter (born 1932) has built up a stylistically heterogeneous and conceptually complex body of painting, photography, sculpture and artist’s books that firmly establishes his status as the most important living artist of our time: today, this diverse oeuvre totals in excess of 3,000 individual works. In February 2012, Hatje Cantz announced the first volume of their Gerhard Richter catalogue raisonné--the first of a projected five volumes, to be issued over the next seven years. Edited by Dietmar Elger, director of the Gerhard Richter Archive at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, who has spent years researching and preparing the publication, this third volume encompasses the works Richter assigned numbers 389–651/2, which span the years 1976 to 1988. Alongside nearly 700 full-color plates (many of them full-page), it includes full technical specifications, information about the artist’s handwritten notes, and the provenance, bibliography and exhibition history for each individual work. This information is further supplemented by commentary, quotations from the artist and comparison images.
