Stadtbild M 2, 1968

About the Work

Gerhard Richter's 'Townscape M2' is the painterly reproduction of a photo. The small format was projected on to the canvas using an episcope and the copy, several times larger than the original, was then painted. The fuzziness of the enlarged city view of Milan, which served as a reference for 'Townscape M2', is expressed in the painting with emphatic brushwork; the subject looks abstracted. The row of houses and the street behind the church tower are no longer defined as individual forms but dissolve into an almost monochrome surface. Enlarged fifty times, the photo results in an enormous picture format which Richter has divided into nine sections. The resulting square pictures of equal size are titled M1 to M9.