Townscape F

The title of the work is based on a mistake: the photograph that was to be used as a basis for this painted bird’s-eye view of a city was actually not a photograph of Frankfurt — as Gerhard Richter had believed for a long time — but a photograph of Munich. This alone shows that Richter was not interested in depicting a specific, significant place, but more with the process of painterly translation and transformation of a source motif captured on a photograph.