Gerhard Richter
Painting’s perpetual explorer.
Gerhard Richter alternates between blurred photo paintings and squeegeed abstractions. He is regarded as one of the most important painters of our time.
Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden and grew up under Nazism and the war. An uncle was killed in the war, and an aunt, Marianne, who suffered from schizophrenia, was murdered in the Nazis’ so-called euthanasia programme. After the war he trained at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in East Germany and painted murals in the spirit of Socialist Realism.
In 1961, shortly before the Berlin Wall was built, he fled to West Germany. He continued his studies at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where he encountered international contemporary art. Together with Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, among others, he ironically launched a “Capitalist Realism” as a response to both Pop Art and the Socialist Realism of the East.
Richter became known for paintings made from photographs, often private snapshots or newspaper pictures in black and white. He blurred the image with a dry brush while the paint was still wet, so that it looks like an out-of-focus photograph. Among them are Aunt Marianne of 1965 and Ema (Nude on a Staircase) of 1966, a portrait of his first wife, in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. The series October 18, 1977, from 1988, is about the members of the terrorist group the RAF who died in Stammheim prison and is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
At the same time he has painted abstract pictures, first grey canvases and colour charts, then from the 1980s large paintings in which he drags paint across the canvas with a long squeegee, so that layers are torn open and mixed. In 2007 he made a large window of thousands of coloured glass squares for Cologne Cathedral. He has also gathered his source material, photographs and sketches into a vast image archive that he calls Atlas.
Richter’s shifts between styles reflect a doubt that any image can give a true picture of reality. He is regarded as one of the most important living painters, and his works are among the most expensive ever sold by a living artist.