Gerhard Richter

Visual artist

• Born: February 9, 1932
• Place of Birth: Place of birth: Dresden, Germany

Significance: Gerhard Richter is a German artist whose career spans decades. His work, produced in several media, is renowned globally. In 2015, his painting Abstraktes Bild (1986) sold for more than $44.5 million, making Richter one of Europe’s most expensive-selling artists.

Background

Gerhard Richter was born on February 9, 1932, in Dresden, Germany. He was the first child of Horst and Hildegard Richter; his sister, Gisela, was born in 1936. His father was a teacher and his maternal grandfather was a noted concert pianist.

Adolf Hitler’s rise to power less than one year after Richter’s birth had a profound effect on his youth, although he was too young to serve in the war. His father was drafted into the German army, captured by the Allies, and held in a prisoner of war camp until 1946. The war also cost the lives of several extended family members and imposed financial hardships on Richter’s family.

The family moved several times during Richter’s youth because of the war, causing him to feel like an outsider during his school years. Although he had a love of literature and was already showing artistic promise, Richter was a poor student. He dropped out of school at age fifteen in favor of attending a vocational school where he studied painting. His mother encouraged his artistic talents and gave him a camera for Christmas when he was a young teen. A nearby shopkeeper taught him how to take and develop photos, providing Richter with a skill he would use throughout his career.

Richter’s first paid work as a painter began shortly after he graduated trade school in 1948 when he went to work as a sign painter, then became an assistant set painter in a theater. He applied to the Dresden Art Academy in 1950 but was turned down. After a time spent painting signs in a factory, he reapplied to the academy and was accepted in 1951. He worked on several important murals before graduating in 1956.

Artistic Career

As a result of his mural work, Richter received enough commissions to become a full-time artist. He also stayed on at the academy for three years teaching classes in life drawing. During this time, he completed a series of thirty-one monotypes entitled Elbe (1957), which were left behind when he relocated to West Germany in 1961 and not shared publicly until they were published in book form in 2009. It was also during this time that he was exposed to the works of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana. The artists impressed him with their unrestricted style and their works encouraged him to leave the more repressive German Democratic Republic in favor of the greater freedom of West Germany.

In 1962, while a student at the Dusseldorf Arts Academy, Richter began working in the technique of photo painting, using a tracing of a photo as a basis for a realistic painting. This technique was dubbed photorealism. He had his first exhibition of these works in September 1962 but burned them immediately after the event. He would, however, continue taking his photographs and gathering the photographs of others to serve as continuous inspiration of his works throughout his career.

In the mid-1960s, Richter worked in several other techniques, including Color Charts, which looked like paint sample cards from a contemporary hardware store but with the colors mixed up instead of coordinated. Some examples of these include the early work entitled 10 Colours (1966) and 256 Colours (1973–74). He also began painting nudes and expanded his art by working in more three-dimensional media such as glass and metal in his 1967 work Four Panes of Glass.

As his career progressed, Richter experimented with other techniques for getting the characteristic blurring of his work, sometimes dragging flat tools across the freshly painted surface to smear and distort the image. These techniques made some works appear to be abstract paintings until the observer notices a word painted in the picture or the title and begins to discern the blurred image that is depicted.

Among his most famous works are the fifteen small paintings in October 18, 1977, painted in 1988 and depicting small aspects of the Baader-Meinhof group, a terrorist organization that committed a number of acts of rebellion and violence in West Germany.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a forty-year retrospective of Richter's work in 2002; the exhibition subsequently traveled to Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Don DeLillo's 2002 short story "Baader-Meinhof" was inspired by this exhibition; in it, two strangers have a chance encounter in the room of the exhibit containin October 18, 1977. In 2017 Richter had his first major exhibition in Australia, Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. Australian composer Paul Grabowsky wrote a series of songs in response to this exhibition; the songs were first performed in February 2018. Also in 2018, Richter received the Europäischer Kulturpreis Taurus for lifetime achievement.

The 2018 film Werk ohne Autor (Never Look Away), directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, was inspired by Richter's life; the film was well received by critics and was nominated for two Academy Awards, but Richter disapproved of the liberties the film took with his biography.

Impact

Richter has pointed out that his paintings begin as tracings of photographs. His works often depict common objects or events, or people in everyday situations. However, his ability to add artistic touches that distort and alter the photo just enough to convey his interpretation and elevate the importance and meaning of his subject has led to him being called a late-modern master.

Richter’s work remained highly sought after in the art world into the 2020s. Two of his paintings, Abstraktes Bild (1986) and Domplatz, Mailand (1968), were among the most expensive artworks by living artists sold at auction as of 2024. Abstraktes Bild was sold for $44.5 million in 2025 and Domplatz, Mailand sold for $37.1 million in 2013.

Personal Life

Richter married Marianne "Ema" Eufinger in West Germany in June 1957, and the couple had a daughter, Betty, in 1966. In 1982, he married for a second time to Isa Genzken, a sculptor. They separated in 1993 and subsequently divorced. Richter married a third time in 1995 to Sabine Moritz, a painter and graphic designer. They had two children, Moritz and Ella.

Bibliography

Galambosova, Caroline, and Nicole Ganbold. "Top 10 Most Expensive Artworks by Living Artists (Updated)." Daily Art, 8 Jan. 2024, www.dailyartmagazine.com/10-most-expensive-artworks-by-living-artists/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

Gayford, Martin. "Gerhard Richter: Behind the Pictures." Telegraph, 20 Sept. 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3561020/Gerhard-Richter-behind-the-pictures.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

"Gerhard Richter Biography." Gerhard Richter, 2024, www.gerhard-richter.com/en/biography. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

Kimmelman, Michael. "Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms." New York Times, 27 Jan. 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/01/27/magazine/an-artist-beyond-isms.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

McCarthy, Tom. "Blurred Visionary: Gerhard Richter’s Photo-Paintings." Guardian, 22 Sept. 2011, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/sep/22/gerhard-richter-tate-retrospective-panorama. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.