Capturing nature

Recently, the voices that perennially decried the death of painting have begun cheering its revival. Throughout the past 40 years, Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter has seen his metier swing in and out of fashion as whimsically as skirt length, and has continued to paint regardless.

Feted and vilified in equal measure for his aesthetic precision and conceptual rigour, his market value has risen steadily over the decades, and today his canvases can fetch well over £3 million at auction.

Underpinning Richter's practice, however, is a questing anxiety about painting and, in particular, its relationship to photography.

His oeuvre veers from realist still lifes, landscapes and portraits, to impastoed monochrome abstracts, but all are invariably painted from photographs. These images he either culls from newspapers and magazines, family collections and advertisements, or else takes himself. Then, through a process no more technologically advanced than that used to create wall frescoes in the early Renaissance, he grids-up and transposes them onto large canvases, obsessively reproducing their wobbly focus and ad hoc composition, their graininess and exaggerated contrasts.

Over the years, Richter has amassed more than 5,000 photographs, some of which incorporate his drawings and diagrams. Unsurprisingly, given the orderliness of his working method, he has not merely kept these images, he has archived them, framing them in groups that he stores by subject. A work of art in itself, he has entitled this immense and unending project 'Atlas', and a specially updated version currently lines the walls of the Whitechapel Gallery.

'Atlas' tells many stories, both personal and political, and is a sort of national photo album for post-war Germany, picturing its Nazi legacy, the East-West schism and the Baader-Meinhof gang. But above all, it charts the visual and philosophical terrain of Richter's art, and shown alongside it are a handful of paintings from key moments in his career, illustrating the key role played by photography.

Presented en masse, these images assume an abstract beauty. Colour seeps in early on, and a personal note is struck via self-portraits and pictures of Richter's own family. Visual echoes ripple through the exhibition, and images of tram tracks and railways are pasted together, tantalisingly close to becoming one. Some photographs, like that of a secretary striding down a corridor in shapely profile, are marked up ready to be painted, while others are bordered with masking tape and smudged pastel fingerprints. The images that Richter found himself unable to paint are those that document the Holocaust. They are shown here alongside vintage pornography - an obvious and gratuitous paralleling.

What you won't find is much art photography. Instead, Richter prefers the naturalness captured by amateurs or newspaper snappers: a toddler tricycling towards the camera and out of the frame; pasty, captioned sunbathers; blurry grins peeking out from beneath period side-partings.

Yet, however obsessively Richter reproduces a snapshot's glitches and banalities, these same details inevitably assume a knowingness when on the canvas. Also, no matter how accidental an image's composition, the very act of framing something in a viewfinder sets defining parameters. As if in recognition of this, here and there Richter fills out images truncated by the camera. Nostalgia-tinged shots of still-life staples, such as fruit and flowers, further problematise the relationship between paint and film, as do those of a woman posing before a painting, a family looking around an art gallery.

Perhaps most fascinating are the images around which Richter sketches a gallery space, complete with a viewer tiny enough to denote the work's towering scale. Upstairs at the Whitechapel is one of the more recent pieces, 'Mirror Painting (Blood Red)', a solid, unvarying oblong of scarlet pigment on glass. Gaze into it and you will see yourself gazing back, the reflection of the floor and the walls falling away behind you as if you had stepped straight into one of Richter's megalomaniac fantasies.