For the subscription edition of Gerhard Richter''s (born 1932) Schriften und Interviews, published by Insel Verlag in 1993 in an edition of 100 copies, the artist drew a small "self-portrait" in pencil on the back of a portrait photograph at the front of the book. Enthused by this work, between September and December 1993 he produced a further 94 signed and dated self-portraits on loose sheets of paper, which are published here for the first time. Seen together as a series, Richter''s exercise becomes truly impressive: despite the consistency of conception, each instance has an individual formal and aesthetic appearance. These pencil drawings form a series of variations whose aspiration is not the gradual approach toward a perfected final outcome, but rather the serial testing of different but equally weighted possibilities of representation within limited specifications.
