Homage to Gerhard Richter

Homage to Gerhard Richter is an unfolding software work rather than a fixed image or a pre-recorded film. Bands of colour can fill the screen, grey marks can travel across them, and expanding circles can replace the striped field with another visual rhythm.

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) is a German painter known for both blurred, photograph-based images and abstract paintings. Nake pays particular tribute to his Strip series, begun in 2011: digital prints whose dense horizontal bands of colour were developed by dividing and mirroring a scanned abstract painting. The homage echoes these stripes, their colour relationships and Richter’s use of systematic procedures and chance. Nake extends that approach into time, using Richter’s strip images within software that overlays moving traces and shifts between visual modes.

Inspection of the artist’s JavaScript source identifies nine modes: growing and shrinking squares; expanding grey or coloured circles; text; fine horizontal lines; selected strip images; and moving spots or trails, either on grey grounds or over the strips. Some modes use colours calculated from the underlying images. Probabilistic decisions govern transitions, so the work is not simply a short animation repeating a predetermined sequence.

The source identifies the work as created in 2018 and describes a port from Processing to JavaScript. It includes a note dated 26 August 2018 referring to an intended Kunsthalle Bremen exhibition. The NFT edition was released by elementum.art in 2022. These are distinct stages in the work’s history; the blockchain release is not its original creation date.