Landschaften
David Zwirner
May 7–July 10, 2026
New York

In his classic study of perception in the industrial age, The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch described the visual blur that accompanied the view out the window from a moving train: the world encountered at a speed humans had not previously known. This was based on perceived distance, in which topographical features in the background remained stable while foreground and middle ground elements moved across one’s visual field at different rates of speed, what he called “panoramic perception.” Since the advent of the railway, artists from J.M.W. Turner to Umberto Boccioni have attempted to convey this effect on vision, until the automobile sadly rendered terrestrial transportive wonders both pedestrian and solitary. The confluence of the railway with the late-Romantic age and the onrushing advent of photography meant that artists could not only get access to more places and experience those journeys at speed, but they were able also to share their visions in photos and subjective artworks. From those impetuses came such divergent approaches in landscape painting as the fine-focus polychromatic realism of the Pre-Raphaelites and the fractured opticality of the Impressionists, with each group’s adherents persisting across all media through the twentieth century.

Gerhard Richter’s exquisite landscapes fall somewhere in the middle: camera-derived but not photorealist, personally experienced scenes marked by irresolution and level tonalities, with surfaces that retain legibility but deny clarity. This largely chronological show features twenty-six oils in four galleries dating from 1965 to 2005, when he moved away from the genre. Many are, unsurprisingly, technically intricate. Seestück (Gegenlicht) of 1969 in gallery one mimics the combination printing in Gustave Le Gray’s composite ocean photographs of the 1850s, wherein he used separate plates for the sky and the sea in order to control the lighting. In this 6 ½ foot square painting derived from two photos, Richter produced astonishingly backlit clouds in the broad sky as in El Greco’s View of Toledo (ca. 1599–1600), with a Turnerian sunburst at upper right, and a swelling illuminated ocean surface with reflections that do not quite line up with the solar entity above. It is the depopulated Northern European sublime, its format and glow reclaimed from Mark Rothko’s signature works. At distance it resolves into defined imagery, but up close the brushwork is blended and edges elided, thwarting focus.

Bonley-Landschaft (1970), largely drained of color, is from a photo taken during a trip to the Canary Islands, although the title does not have a specific geographical reference. There is a surprising level of impasto on the surface, with the paint forming furrows across rises in the landscape. In the earliest work on display, Grosse Sphinx von Gise of 1965, Richter blew up a black-and-white postcard and included the descriptive text in the lower border, in contrast to the sphinx and pyramid of Cheops above, where the wet paint has been exclusively dragged horizontally to gently blur the forms. But unlike in subsequent works, bristle marks remain visible.

Richter’s “Landschaften” project combined responses to places he visited or where he lived, in no matter how neutral a manner, with a theoretical and procedural exploration of the meanings of mark-making, recognition, and subsumed cultural history. Gallery two develops this idea in an iceberg that channels Arnold Böcklin, oil on panel and jewel-toned images of Mount Vesuvius, as well as a canny installation of two works measuring 6 ½ feet tall by nearly 10 feet wide: Abstraktes Bild of 1977 and Seestück from 1975. Abstraktes Bild is a multi-hued illusionistic abstraction with a predominant yellow haze, prismatic shafts of light, and passages of dark whose massings recall awe-inspiring Biblical Romantic paintings by Turner or John Martin. It conveys what John Ruskin called “mountain glory” without recognizable crags or peaks. Seestück is a landscapeless seascape—seemingly all cloud, as if Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809–10) lost its Rückenfigur of a monk and sands and birds and just became atmospherics.