Stadt

By 1968, Richter had spent several years translating found photographs onto canvas in his Photo Painting series – press images, amateur snapshots, reproductions from magazines – and Stadt transfers that same impulse into screenprint. Here the halftone process itself becomes a visual material. Viewed closely, the image dissolves into a field of dots; at distance, those dots cohere into diagonal masses of shadow, building edge, and compressed urban geometry. The specific subject – a city scene taken from a tight angle, its architectural elements folded into one another – is legible as urban fabric but resists precise identification.

That resistance was intentional. Richter's halftone grain functions here as photographic blur does in his paintings: it marks the distance between image and referent, between what a photograph records and what a viewer can recover from it. Stadt does not describe a city so much as record what remains of one when the image is pushed to the edge of readability. As one of the earliest prints Richter produced, and one of the few to engage directly with the urban subject matter that preoccupied his paintings of the same period, it holds a distinct position within his graphic work.