Aline Guillermet uncovers Gerhard Richter's appropriation of science and technology from 1960 to the present and shows how this has shaped the artist's well-documented engagement with the canon of Western painting.

Through a study of Richter's portraits, history paintings, landscapes and ornamental abstractions, Guillermet reveals the artist's role in affirming the technological condition of painting in the second half of the twentieth century: a historical situation in which the medium and its conventions have become shaped, and to some extent transformed, by technological innovations.