Gerhard Richter' created a group of thirty abstract paintings and a series of forty drawings between December 2014 and May 2015. It was a new beginning for him - he had not painted for four years until the Birkenau cycle in the summer of 2014. In his essay 'Starting again. New abstract pictures by Gerhard Richter,' Dieter Schwarz traces the historical and aesthetic reference system of Richter's abstract paintings, while Benjamin H.D. Buchloh arranges Richter's drawings within the larger contaxt of the position of the genre in the history of modernism. 'Abstract paintings' is a major representation of works from 2005 to 2009, including an important new cycle of paintings entitled Sinbad, individual paintings presenting medium to large format abstractions, and a new group of near-monochrome paintings, whose underlying chromatic structures are covered by translucent veils of white paint. In his essay 'Voids and whites: The last paintings before the last', Buchloh traces the historical and aesthtic framework of Righter's abstract paintings and considers the artist's recent white, non-representational works within the larger context of a postwar trajectory of reductivist painting in the US and Europe.