A rainy weekend heralded the opening of Gerhard Richter’s exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. Gerhard Richter is famous for achieving the highest auction price for a living European artist (Abstraktes Bild fetched US$46.3 million in 2015), but his importance as an artist is due to his commitment to painting during a postwar period when many had abandoned the medium. The associated mental image may be a dominant ‘bass note’ of grey in tune with the Brisbane weather. Yet, as the exhibition makes clear, there is prescience in Richter’s work; his interest in probing at the casual photography that has become the ubiquitous feature of our times.