Gerhard Richter: Patterns: Divided, Mirrored, Repeated Hardcover – August 31, 2012

The cover gives you a good idea of what to expect in this book: page after page of repeating-type patterns. I find these mesmerizing to look at and my reason for not giving the book more stars is that the dimensions of the book are too small. You get a lot of pages, reproduction is good and binding is sturdy, but the artwork would have been better presented in a larger format. Still, despite the size, if you like what you see on the cover you'll probably enjoy the book.

The idea that unfolds in this book can change the way you see things. It is a remarkable scientific art experiment and a stunningly beautiful vision. Gerhard Richter is one of the most inventive and thoughtful artists of our time. His work turns what we thought we knew into something we never dreamed we would every see. This is a compact dense book where every page is full rich color. One image unfolds to remarkable depth, reminding me of the way fractals work, always having a common thread or unit as the root of each image. It's really fun to sit and look through - very much the experience I had when I first looked through the book  Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe . This book, fractals and "Powers of Ten" all embody this unfolding into the inner workings of an image and, thus, also make me think of how I can look into the inner parts of my body, mind and soul. Really worth the price.

This is certainly not for everyone (but it's priced to be accessible to everyone), but if you're fascinated by the mind and craft of Richter, this little book is an art object in itself. And if you're not fascinated by the mind and craft of Richter, one of our greatest living artists, you should be.

This book is mesmerizing. Richter's ability to entrance and bewilder the viewer is just astounding. I was familiar with Richter's photo-realistic blur paintings before picking up this book, interested to see what his abstract side was all about. I was none too surprised, but all the more amazed. The stylisitic paradox he achieved through blurry hyper-realism, he's now swapped and applied to abstraction. The more abstract the patterns become, the more order was taken to create them. From cover to cover, this feels like a fluid whirlwind of acute precision. The book's only text is a brief explanation of Richter's process in creating these patterns...which makes sense, because the visual experience truly speaks for itself. Plus, for containing so much material, it's fairly compact in size, adding nice spatial variety to my coffee table collection. Great price, cool art, awesome book!

This book is well printed and based on the fact that it is just one repeated image, it could have been worst. I must reiterate however, it is just one image digitally multiplied.