Your Daily Awesome

Seventy-five-year-old Gerhard Richter has been challenging the conventions of painting and photography for decades. But his most recent project, a stained glass window for Germany’s Cologne Cathedral, finds the artist playing with two other media, to fascinating effect: the ancient art of stained glass and the far-less ancient art of digital imaging.

Contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter designed the 65-foot-tall work to replace the original, destroyed by bombs in World War II. As a starting point, he used his own 1974 painting, “4096 Colors.” To create that piece—a 64-by-64 grid of squares—Richter devised a mathematical formula to systematically mix permutations of the three primary colors and gray. Funny coincidence: 4,096 is also the number of “Web-smart” colors that display consistently on older computer screens, a limitation some Web designers still take into account. (Today’s monitors, of course, can handle pretty much any hue.) The Cologne window is made of 11,500 four-inch ” pixels” cut from original antique glass in a total of 72 colors. Why not 4,096? Turns out there are stained glass-smart colors, too. Some hues in Richter’s initial design were either historically inaccurate or too pale—they would have outshone the squares around them. So the artist modified his palette to include only colors with a suitably archaic cast.

via Supercolossal