Alright, so the title is slightly misleading–German artist Gerhard Richter has been producing abstract “colour charts” since the early 1970s, long before pixel-art became a tangible theme in design. But his latest work is housed in a wonderfully different context: the famous Cologne Cathedral. Although this gargantuan building should be seen by everyone, now there’s even more reason for those interested in 21st century design to take the trip. Make it truly worthwhile and go on Carnival’s famous Rose Monday (not until February 23rd, 2009!) for one of the best European street festivals around.

We find, from the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, a succinct overview of the recent work and its reception:

A vast window by Richter was installed last year in the south transept of the Cologne Cathedral, a Gothic bastion of Roman Catholicism in northern Europe, which was begun in 1248 and finally completed in 1880 (when it became, for four years, the world’s tallest building). It is the Germans’ favorite tourist attraction, according to a recent poll.

His results continue to foster discussion among professional art critics and casual observers:

But controversy lingers in Cologne, where, despite the public’s acceptance, cynics have derided Richter’s work as “pixels” and “confetti.” [...] The literally paradoxical, if not quite heretical, results of [the project] pose a question of whether, in Christian Europe today, art on celebrated artists’ terms has risen to equality with religion or if religion has sunk to the level of mere art.

It turns out Richter was close to giving up when he laid one of his famous colour chart paintings over top an image of the church window:

Richter’s chief model was his own huge painting “4096 Colors” (1974), in which each of a thousand and twenty-four sprayed-enamel colors, in a graduated spectrum of hues and tones, appears four times. It was composed by chance. (Chance is “more clever than I,” he has said.) Richter likewise randomized the window’s squares within sections that mirror one another at intervals, like the rhymes in a verse form. The result employs seventy-two colors that he deemed consistent with those of the cathedral’s forty-three windows dating from 1260 to 1562 (which survived the war in storage), and close enough in tone to avoid spots of disrupting opacity and glare.

We’re crazy over the idea of sanctioned pixel-art in an antiquated container. Have any other stories of contemporary design in a radically unexpected context? Share them with us!