Gerhard Richter

Introduction: Who is Gerhard Richter?

Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, and currently resides and works in Cologne. The German artist is best known for his meticulously rendered photo paintings, in contrast to his bold abstract paintings using a large squeegee instead of a paintbrush.

Richter is arguably the most famous painter today, and is one of the most important contemporary artists in general. He shifts from a photographic realism with a blurred effect, to pure abstraction, as no other artist has ever done before. His oeuvre is the result of an ongoing examination of painting as a medium an sich.

With shows at the most renowned institutions across the globe, encompassing major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, up to Tate Modern in London, Richter’s impressive career spanning across over half a century has been a certainty in today’s art world.

But how did a boy from Dresden become one of the greatest artists in the world to wield a paintbrush? Welcome to the complete biography and disquisition of his oeuvre, a digital retrospective, and (written) film. Welcome to the story of Gerhard Richter.

Biography: The Story of Gerhard Richter

This biography is a paraphrased and shortened version of the official Gerhard Richter biography which can be accessed here.

1932–1950: Gerhard Richter’s Youth

As stated in our introduction, Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, on February 9. He was the first child of Horst Richter — who worked as a teacher at a secondary school — and his wife Hildegard — a bookseller who also loved playing the piano. The young Gerhard would welcome his sister four years later into the family, which was an average middle-class household.

The Richter family moved in 1935 as his father accepted a teaching position at a school in Reichenau, currently known as Bogatynia, Poland. Doing so, the family was largely safe from the war to come, in which Horst Richter was called up to join army. He was eventually detained by the Allied forces as a prisoner of war, and was only released in 1946.

The family relocated once more to Waltersdorf, experiencing difficult years due to the lingering effects of the Second World War in which his father had participated as a Nazi soldier. The war had left a deep impact on the young Gerhard, marked by economic hardship and personal loss. He lost his uncles and aunts in the war, and vividly recalls his mother screaming when they received the news.

Personally, he experienced the war as a child from a safe distance, but close enough to recall the vast impact of the terrors which happened around him. He was too young to understand the ideological aspects of war, but found real weapons in the woods around his home, and the bombing of his town of birth Dresden made an enduring impression on Richter. Elements which would play an important role for his artistic practice.

Gerhard Richter reflects upon this period with a mixture of frustration and fondness. Richter himself seemed to be a highly gifted child, but a notoriously bad student in school. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Richter started to develop his interest in art and culture. He received a camera as a Christmas gift from his mother, and a camera shop owner in Watersdorf taught him how to develop photographs.

Furthermore, he had regained access to literature which had been forbidden during the Nazi-regime, and encouraged by his mother, these illustrated books resulted in his first drawings. By the age of 15, Gerhard Richter started to draw on a regular basis, creating landscapes, self-portraits, nudes, and more — genres he would continue to work with throughout his career.

In 1947 in Zittau, he would start taking his first evening classes in painting, but he was not aspiring to become a professional artist yet. From 1948 until 1951 he would study stage and billboard painting, before returning to Dresden during the summer to start his formal art studies at the Hochschule for Bildende Künste Dresden, the Dresden Art Academy.

1951–1960: The Dresden Years

Many buildings in Dresden were still in ruins due the bombing, as they still had to walk through rubble and stones to get from one building to the next. After having lived with his aunt Gretl for a while, he moved into an apartment with some friends in the same street as the apartment of Marianna Eufinger, know as ‘Ema’, whom he married in 1957.

At the academy, he was trained academically marked by Socialist Realism. He joined the department for mural painting which was a bit less strict. For his thesis, he would paint a mural for the Deutsches Hygienemuseum which was received very well, resulting in a position in the academy’s program for promising students.

Things seemed to be smooth sailing. He had a studio from the academy, a steady income for three years, and was able to do a number of commissioned murals. However, he felt increasingly uncomfortable within the restrictions of the academy. He did not wanted to commit fully to Socialist Realism, but was also critical towards the underground art scene and Capitalism. He was in search for a so called third way, including the best of both spheres, between the East and the West.

A crucial event for the development of Gerhard Richter was visiting Documenta II in Kassel in 1959. He was strongly impressed by the works of Jackson Pollock or Lucio Fontana. As if an epiphany, Richter realized the creative prohibitions towards abstraction were wrong, as was his way of thinking up to that point. Due to the political situation of the Cold War and Richter’s realization the West offers more when it comes to his artistic endeavours, Gerhard and Ema left the GDR for West Germany.

1961–1970: The Düsseldorf Academy & Becoming a Professional Artist

Doing so, Gerhard and Ema arrived in Düsseldorf and as Richter started studying at the Düsseldorf Academy. He started out swinging, testing everything he could resulting in a very productive period. However, afterwards he was unhappy with these works and destroyed many of these paintings, with his ‘true’ oeuvre only starting in 1962.

Richter arrived in a vibrant art scene, and quickly became friends with among others Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo and Konrad Fischer (formerly Konrad Lueg). Due to the presence of Joseph Beuys as a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy, Richter was also very impressed by Fluxus.

They discovered and engaged with American Pop Art since 1962. During one of their earliest shows, the group of friends, seen as the German pop artists, presented their own movement, titled Capitalist Realism — a quip reference to Socialist Realism, but also a label Richter wasn’t too satisfied about.

Richter was interested in current affairs, consumer society, new media, and popular culture. He incorporated these elements in his painterly practice, depicting for instance televisions, design magazines, advertisements or political figures and events.

This was the genesis of Richter’s professional oeuvre, and photography was the starting point in combination with his characteristic blurred effect — something which used to be impossible with his academic background. Immediately he started to examine the relationship between both media, a true pillar within his artistic practice.

The German artist was interested and fascinated by the dialectic relation between the objectivity and the subjectivity when painting photographs. For Richter, the photograph was the most perfect picture. He could eliminate conscious thinking, as the picture does not change, it is absolute, autonomous, unconditional and not linked to any style. With his blurred effect, he made everything equal. Equally important and simultaneously equally unimportant.

He was strongly drawn to depicting certain subjects from found photographic material, think of military subjects, family portraits, images from newspapers or magazines. The selected images of all have a their own narrative and motive to be painted, most often combining death or suffering and its exploitation in media.

From 1963-1964, Richter had his first exhibitions and commercial successes, collaborating with several galleries, and also collectors were starting to get really interested in his work and career. This support so early on his career would increase his visibility outside of Düsseldorf.

A landmark year for Gerhard Richter was 1966, for many reasons. The first, the birth of his daughter Betty — whom he iconically painted in 1988 —, he also painted his wife Ema (Nude on a Staircase) — one of his most famous works he ever painted — and, he took on geometric abstraction with his Colour Charts, influenced by his friend Blinky Palermo, but also Pop Art and Minimal Art.

Richter had already been experimenting with abstraction and minimal painting, think of the abstracted blur or washed out zones of oil paint, but also depicting very minimal elements, such as curtains, tubes, turning sheets of paper, or daily objects. The Colour Charts were copies of paint sample cards, which paved the way for Richter’s future abstract paintings.

After Ema (Nude on a Staircase), Richter would paint several (erotic) nudes in 1967, followed by cityscapes, aerial views, mountains, starscapes, clouds, seascapes and landscapes in 1968 and 1969. With these artworks, there is this notion of both an almost nostalgic romanticism and an ongoing exploration of abstraction. He would paint many shadow pictures, corrugated iron as a geometric abstract works, grey monochromes, colour streaks and grids, arriving at pure abstraction and questioning the limits of representation.

By the end of the decade, Richter had established himself as a contemporary artist, participating in a group exhibitions across the globe. In 1969, he was included in the exhibition Nine Young Artists at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, his first show at a major institution. However, Richter was still unsure about the future and in search for a specific direction, so his painterly experiments would continue.

1971–1980: Exploring Abstraction

With his career on the up, Richter was exhibiting with his good friend Konrad Fischer who became a very progressive gallerists, showcasing the top artists of Minimal Art, Conceptual Art and Formalism — think of Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Fred Sandback, On Kawara or Richard Long. In this context, Richter felt much more at home with painting, allowing the artist to take on painting outside of its tradition, questioning it as no other artist had done before.

During the first years of this decade, Richter painted many portraits, of which a specific series of 48 portraits would be showcased at the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972 — followed by participating in Documenta 5 in Kassel. But he would also continue to create grid paintings, and especially grey monochrome paintings.

These experiments brought him to his Vermalung or Inpaintings, in which he continued to examine the relation between representation and abstraction. What started as a representational painting was being reworked in such a manner the imagery was entirely obliterated, using gestural brushstrokes and impastos.

Uniquely, Richter made these gestural brushstrokes without being expressive, pulling the paint across the canvas in an emotionless manner, removing expression as an impelling force of painting. Doing so, Richter emphasized the painterly gesture. A witness, of Richter’s engagement towards the abstract as a counter-model of the figurative, coming to terms with the new possibilities for painting offered by abstraction and Minimalism.

Furthermore, from a personal perspective, the 1970s were not the happiest of years for Gerhard Richter, as his marriage withv Ema was gradually coming to an end, and he lost his very dear friend Blinky Palermo unexpectedly in 1976. As a result, his grey paintings, but also his figurative works — think of his seascapes — are imbedded with melancholy.

In 1977, Richter took on new directions, creating two sculptural pieces using glass — something he would develop further in the future —, but also introducing colourful abstract works referred to as Abstraktes Bild or Abstract Painting. A new investigation of perception, colour, light, space, depth and optics emerged. And as Richter formally separated from Ema in 1979, a decade which was dominated by grey ended with colour and marked a new chapter in the life and oeuvre of Gerhard Richter.

1981–1990: Rising to International Acclaim

The following decade, Richter’s fame would rise to astronomical heights. The general interest in painting was strongly been reinvigorated, think of the arrival of Neo-Expressionism for instance, and Richter was seen by many as the forerunner of this revival of painting. At this very moment, he was really getting into his stride with his Abstract Paintings.

From a personal point of view, Gerhard Richter got together with Isa Genzken — one of the most important sculptors of the contemporary era — and they got married in 1982. They would move to a new and larger studio, offered by Richter’s gallerist Rudolf Zwirner, in Cologne, where the artist continues to reside however with a different house and studio nowadays.

With his abstract paintings being very successful, there was somewhat a question mark next to his figurative paintings. However, at this point in time, he painted his iconic candles during the first half of the decade, but also new landscapes in a very close dialogue with his abstract works, indicating the close alignment of both spheres.

Even more, during the second half of the 1980s, Richter would create stunning field and meadow pieces, followed by his Baader-Meinhof pictures, one of his most controversial series, discussing a group of radicals in Germany and terrorist acts in the 1970s. A topic, which was Richter’s most provocative and politically charged body of works up to this day.

His abstract works developed towards his characteristic technique using a squeegee instead of a paintbrush, pushing the colour across the surface, creating new depths, textures, and contrasts. The variety of his oeuvre could easily have been a pitfall for Richter’s career, but in the end, it was his greatest strength.

During the 1980s, and in particular by the end of the decade, Richter achieved true international recognition. In 1985 he received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, had his first major retrospective which travelled from Berlin to Bern, and to Vienna in 1986, numerous group exhibitions at renowned institutions, and by the turn of the decade he was being represented by industry leading galleries such as Marian Goodman in New York, or Anthony d’Offay in London.

1991–2000: Consolidation and Evolution

The 1990s would be filled with one-man shows, awards, and recognitions. He starts the decade strongly committed to his Abstract Paintings and would also continue to experiment with mirrors and glass, a result of his ongoing interest in minimal abstraction. The intersection of both was also noticeable in his abstract painterly practice with structured and minimal abstraction, using stripes and grids, another chapter in his painterly research.

With Richter, his personal life is often reflected in his work. In 1993, he painted a series of works of his wife Isa Genzken with her back faced to the artist, as if a certain detachment is suggested. This series of iconic works, titled after the contemporary sculptor’s initials ‘I.G.’, would once again be one of his most famous series, personal and powerful.

Shortly after, they would go their separate ways. Richter met Sabine Moritz, another contemporary artist, and got married shortly after his divorce. He created a similar series of portraits, however, Sabine Moritz was facing the artist this time, and thus the viewer.

In 1995, they had a son named Moritz, followed by a series of paintings of mother and child – utmost personal and intimate, hence its power. The family moved to a new home in the south of Cologne and in 1996 they would welcome their daughter Ella Maria.

The German artist would continue to produce predominantly abstract works as it came very natural to him. He also discovered a new genre in the 1990s which was his Overpainted Photographs. Doing so, once more he negotiated with languages of figuration, abstraction and the photograph.

By the end of the millennium, Richter has had a retrospective exhibition at Tate Gallery in London (1991), participated in Documenta 9 & 10 in Kassel (1992 & 1997), major retrospectives (from 1993 up to 1994) at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Moderna Must in Stockholm and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, he won the Wolf Prize in Arts in Jerusalem (1995), the prestigious Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997), the Premium Imperial award in Tokyo (1997), the Weiner Award in Ohio (1998) and the Staatspreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (1999).

2001–Today: Richter in the 21st Century

During the 21st century, Richter would continue to gather awards, honors and retrospectives, becoming the most famous painter today, and arguably the most famous living artist today. He started the new millennium with a major retrospective in 2002 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting. Showcasing 190 works, Forty Years of Painting is his most comprehensive retrospective to date.

He continued to focus on his Abstract Paintings, followed by some figurative paintings, and experimentations with glass. In 2005, he painted September, depicting the attacks on the World Trade Center in a way only Richter could. A small painting, but filled with power. In 2006, the artist would paint his famous Cage paintings. Six monumental canvases titled after John Cage, acquired by Tate Modern in 2008 and are on permanent display up to this day.

In 2007, Richter completed his commission for new stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral inspired by his 1974 painting 4.094 Colours. The next year, the German painter started his series of colorful abstract works titled Sinbad. From 2011 and onwards, Richter would also experiment with the use of technology and digital prints, think of his horizontal bands of colour titles Strips.

Since 2000/2010, one could argue Richter reached the peak of the art world. Amazingly, the artist continues to consolidate this position, finding new directions with his practice year to year. Stunning retrospectives across the globe and actively participating in the art world dialogue seem to be key elements for Richter to sustain his presence.

Gerhard Richter is undoubtedly one of the most successful, and most influential artists of his generation. It was painting who took a young boy from Dresden by the hand, to become a highly established artist traveling the world.

For further reading on Gerhard Richter, we strongly recommend te monographic publication Gerhard Richter: Panorama.

Last Updated on October 26, 2024