Some interesting permutations of Gerard Richter's 1024 Colours

Abstract This paper focus on Gerhard Richter's painting '1024 Colours', in particular the search for alternative colour permutations to the one randomly defined. The trigger was an observation by the artist "that light would have taken more than 400 billion years to travel from the first painting to the last", if he had painted all possible permutations. A system was developed to find the 1024-permutation that best matches any given base image, using optimisation techniques and colour distances as a measure of colour similarity. The results indicate that it is usually possible to recognise the base image content in the 1024-permutation, even for complex images.