Kanarische Landschaften I - b

The Kanarische Landschaften series represents a sustained engagement with landscape through the medium of photography, sitting alongside but distinct from Richter's better-known painted works. Made from the artist's own photographs of the Canary Islands rather than found or appropriated imagery, the prints are presented with deliberate modesty: each image mounted small and centrally on a large cream-white sheet with a hand-drawn pencil border.

In Kanarische Landschaften I – b, the composition is particularly expansive. The flat, ochre and amber terrain of the foreground occupies only the lower quarter of the image, leaving the remainder to the sky and its heavy, shifting cloud formations. A flat-topped volcanic mesa sits on the horizon, low and distant. The slight blur of Richter's photographic exposure – a quality found consistently across the series – gives the scene an unstable, just-out-of-reach character. What should be a factual landscape record becomes something more ambiguous.

This quality – the slippage between description and atmosphere – is central to the series. Made in 1971, the Kanarische Landschaften photographs are not documents of a place but propositions about what a photograph of a place can be.