Gerhard Richter, Sea. Photo: Saint Louis Art Museum.

SAINT LOUIS.- The Saint Louis Art Museum announces the June 13 opening of Prints of Gerhard Richter, an exhibition of seven offset lithographs from the Museum’s collection produced by influential German artist Gerhard Richter between 1967 and 1972. The exhibition complements other works by Richter and his contemporaries in the featured exhibition The Immediate Touch: German, Austrian and Swiss Drawings from St. Louis Collections, 1946–2007, on view June 29–September 7 in the Main Exhibition Galleries.

The lithographs featured in the exhibition are based on Richter’s own photographs of seascapes and urban architecture. The artist draws the viewer into these prints through their apparent factuality as photographic images, yet complicates attempts to read them through elements of manipulation, such as blurring and juxtaposition. By discreetly disrupting the coherence and legibility of photographic imagery, he draws attention to the slippery relationship between image, object and reproduction and to our own processes of perception. He chose to utilize offset lithography—a photo-mechanical process—to heighten the matter-of-fact appearance of the works and conceal his involvement in their execution.

Curated by Eric Lutz, assistant curator of prints, drawings and photographs, Prints of Gerhard Richter is on view in Gallery 321 through September 14, 2008.

The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation’s leading comprehensive art museums with collections that include works of art of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes and European and American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with particular strength in 20th-century German art.