b. 1932
Gerhard Richter
One of the most famous artists to emerge from post-war Germany, Gerhard Richter is known for his prolific, varied, and widely influential painting practice. He has explored the intersection of photography and painting, making figurative canvases based on found images and abstractions that incorporate visual effects of photography. Richter often works at a monumental scale and has made glass panels and stained glass windows. Layering and erasure are often critical to his practice. The artist studied at the Kunstakademie in Dresden and the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. He has exhibited extensively across the world, at institutions such as the Museum Barberini, the Serpentine Galleries, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Tate Modern, among others. His work has sold for tens of millions of dollars on the secondary market.
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About the artist
Unrestrained by any one visual style, German artist Gerhard Richter’s art spans abstraction to photorealism, glasswork to photography. Richter’s eclectic work is rich in varied media, from his famous reproductions of both banal and historic photography to his sheer panes of glass and church windows.
Born in 1932 in Dresden, Richter’s upbringing was shaped by the war and death that surrounded him. Though originally trained in the strict Socialist-Realist style, it is perhaps unsurprising that he would go on to produce work that advocates for the death of painting.
After the war, Richter was based in East Germany, where he studied mural painting at the Dresden Art Academy from 1951. Later, after a spell in Moscow, he decided to defect to West Germany, where he made a living building carnival floats and painting theatre sets, before studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. It was here that he began his art career in earnest.
Early Works
The first catalogued work by Richter was a piece entitled Table (1962); he destroyed most of the paintings he had produced before this time in a fire outside the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The fire was prompted by the result of Richter’s first exhibition, which took place in Fulda, outside Frankfurt, in September 1962. He was asked to fill a gap in the program left by a postponed show; and though he sold nothing, his work was met with controversial criticism, which motivated Richter to burn all of his work and start afresh with renewed enthusiasm. As a result, little is known about these formative years, except that they featured a blend of figurative and abstract styles, taking the form of portraits of his wife and a series of abstract works he called ‘spots.’
It was after this fire that Richter began using photographs from magazines and newspapers to inspire his paintings. It was these works that established him as a notable artist and led to exhibitions across Germany in 1964 and 1965.
Influences
In 1959, Richter saw the works of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana at Documenta II in Kassel. Seeing these abstract works helped him come to terms with the censorship that restricted art in East Germany to strictly traditional, figurative works. He soon fled to West Germany, determined to pursue his own preferred abstract style. Richter’s education at the Düsseldorf Art Academy formed much of his artistic influence. The curriculum was rich in the abstraction of Art Informel and the ground-breaking, media-challenging Fluxus movement. It was notably the work of John Cage, particularly known for his notation work and experimentation with Fluxus, who influenced Richter’s approach of planning compositions through a combination of planned structure and chance procedures.
Current Market
Though his work seems to have slightly plateaued in terms of record prices, Gerhard Richter's prints, paintings, and photography do consistently well in both the primary and secondary market.
Despite a minor dip in the market regarding the price of Gerhard Richter’s artwork, as a highly regarded and influential artist of the 20th Century, Gerard Richter's prints continue to achieve impressive prices at auction.
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