Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter’s artistic explorations, which stretch over more than six decades, constitute a radical attempt to integrate representation and abstraction. Known for his painted copies of black and white photographs rendered with a blurred effect, Richter has broadened the potentials of both photography and painting.

Born 1932 in Dresden, Germany, Richter’s childhood was affected by the rise of the Nazi regime and the traumatic events of World War II. According to some of his critics, these painful memories, combined with a regimented life in East Germany under Soviet rule, discouraged him from conveying ideological expressions through art. Such unpretentious perspective materialises in his continued focus on colour combinations and on the tangible quality of his canvases.

Richter began his studies at the Dresden Art Academy in 1951. A turning point for his artistic development was his visit to documenta 2 in Kassel in 1959. Here, he experienced the radical abstractions of Pollock, Fontana and Jean Fautrier, which sparked in him the need to adopt completely new expressive forms.

In 1961, Richter fled to West Germany where he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In this liberated, experimental environment, Richter first produced his photo‐realistic paintings, in which he developed his trademark blur. This technique paradoxically adds both realism and distance to the oil paintings which he copied from photographs.

At a time when his contemporaries were captivated by the new possibilities of conceptual art, Richter proved that there were still undiscovered lands in the world of painting to be explored. Richter’s blurred paintings embody a reflection on both the mechanical nature of the original photographs and the manual nature of his works, which emerge through the paint’s disrupted appearance. Such interests in multimediality and in the hidden potentials of materials originated from Richter’s connections with contemporary art movements such as the influential Fluxus, which combined absurdist content with original artistic forms.

In the 1970s Richter produced an extensive series known as ‘Grey paintings’ which experimented with abstraction as a means for questioning the limits of representation. Painting canvases exclusively in tones of grey, Richter attempted to unveil a neutral, uncomplicated kind of communicative potential. From this moment onward, most of Richter’s work has been preoccupied with the interferences between the production of an illusionistic space and the physical, material realities of the act of painting.

Unwilling to stick to one genre, however, Richter ventured in and out of abstraction, at first creating colour charts from commercial samples, then moving to more expressive gestures and techniques. His discursive use of the body emerges in his squeegee paintings, initiated in the 1980s, which involve the often taxing physical labour of distributing oil paint across large canvases. These images create immediately recognisable, intriguingly complex and colourful results.

His interest for multimediality transpires in his permanent installations, such as his stained glass windows for the south transept of the Cathedral of Cologne (2007), in which powerful light and colour juxtapositions come to life through a complete abandonment to the power of chance.

Richter’s reflectiveness, bold experimentations and painterly skills have made him an artist beloved by critics, collectors and the wider public alike. Richter’s artistic achievements are showcased in the world’s most renowned museums with major exhibitions and permanent displays. Experimenting with different media and exploring technical innovations, Richter has consistently produced new ways of understanding the world through the lens of art.