HOMAGE TO GERHARD RICHTER
Homage to Gerhard Richter is Frieder Nake’s first and only series brought to the blockchain. The software based system renders an endless cycle of procedural images directly inspired by Richter’s striped paintings. The series was brought to life with the help of generative art expert and curator, Georg Bak, on the Elementum platform.
Based on the theories of Max Bense and Abraham Moles, the first generative works of art were created in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the founding fathers of computer art is Frieder Nake (a former student of Max Bense), who designed his first programmed plotter drawings at the Technical University of Stuttgart in 1963 and visualized them on the “Graphomat” (ZUSE Z64) drawing machine. Nake dedicates his Genesis NFT “Homage to Gerhard Richter” to the painter of the century, Gerhard Richter, in his most recent work of art.
One of Frieder Nake’s best-known works is the “Hommage à Paul Klee”, which was created in 1965 and paid tribute to the Bauhaus artist by the principle of chance. “Chance is better than me”, Gerhard Richter was once quoted when he made colour charts based on algorithms. In Frieder Nake’s homage, an algorithm continuously generates Richter’s striped images in endless variations.