DATE: 12/17/2012 | BY CORY REYNOLDS

Intricate Beauty: Gerhard Richter, Patterns

Our top holiday gift book of the year, Gerhard Richter: Patterns comes highly recommended by The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, Time Magazine's Belinda Luscombe and Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio, who writes, "The effect of diving into this book—and that is precisely how it feels, like plummeting headlong through an image—recalls the 1977 Charles and Ray Eames documentary Powers of Ten. In that film, the camera zoomed exponentially far out in space to view a picnic scene from one hundred million light years away and then zoomed back in, through the solar system, the earth’s atmosphere, and then into a man’s hand, and his DNA, stopping on an image of a single, shimmering proton. Patterns affords travel in both directions, too; if treated like a flip book, you can page from the front or the back, macro to micro, or vice versa... Pausing to study any one spread (an image mirrored across the book’s gutter) can be... vertiginous and rewarding: The intricate beauty feels at once machined and biomorphic. Allow yourself to fall into any one image: Relax your eyes for a minute. No 3-D picture of the Starship Enterprise will emerge. But you will see something at least as surprising: what division and multiplication actually look like, the very shape and motion of arithmetic. In this depiction of the invisible, Richter assuredly links abstract painting to the abstraction of numbers." Featured image is a detail from Gerhard Richter: Patterns.