AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.CLOSE READOur critic Jason Farago on how the artist conceived a new way forward for landscape painting.Listen · 11:22 min June 11, 2026“Garmisch” is one of 26 paintings on view in “Gerhard Richter: Landschaften,” at David Zwirner in New York: a perfectly paced showcase of paintings from the 20th century that, at the same time, makes a direct argument about how to live in the 21st.This 94-year-old heavyweight of German painting may feel commonplace to encounter now.

His blurry, staticky pictures, some as famous as his Sonic Youth album cover and as expensive as an F-16 Falcon, have become milestones in his lifelong effort to face up to the void left by the last century’s political and ideological cataclysms.ImageGerhard Richter, “Grosse Sphinx von Gise (Great Sphinx of Gizeh),” 1965.

One of Richter’s early photo-based paintings, it reproduces an illustration of the ancient Egyptian monument as well as its caption.Credit...Gerhard Richter; via David ZwirnerBut the landscapes in the Zwirner show reawakened something in me: the astonishment I first felt in front of Richter, before these strange, streaky pictures had become quite so familiar.

They reawakened, too, my belief that Richter’s stutters and equivocations are among the finest models imaginable of how to push through a cultural or intellectual deadlock.ImageA view of “Gerhard Richter: Landschaften,” at David Zwirner. The artist has painted hundreds of abstract pictures; his landscapes are rarer.Credit...via David ZwirnerThe paintings here include loans from significant public and private collections, some of which have not been seen in the United States for decades.

Most are views of the sea, mountain, field or sky, in Germany, in Italy, that tease at the Romantic sublime but remain always clotted and motionless. Yet several of the landscapes at Zwirner are in fact “abstract pictures,” to borrow Richter’s proudly generic title, where confident gestures get negated and scraped away by a squeegee dragged across the surface.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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