Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1931 and began studying art there at the Academy of Fine Arts after the end of the Second World War. After a brief period of artistic creativity in the GDR, he fled to West Berlin in 1961 and continued his studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in Karl Otto Götz’s class.

In the mid-1960s, he began to transfer photographic motifs onto canvas. Richter did not practice pure photorealism; he altered the image to create a mystical blur that concealed the motif behind a slight haze. Over time, Richter intensified this blurring and painted over his photorealistic paintings in an increasingly abstract manner. The motifs for his works mostly came from newspapers or magazines, but Richter also took photographs himself. In addition to people with personal references, the artist also used objects, landscapes and cityscapes as motifs. The “Seascapes”, which were created after his trip to Greenland in 1975, and the motif of the candle, which has repeatedly appeared in his oeuvre since the 1980s, are particularly noteworthy.

Richter also intensively explored political themes such as reappraising the Nazi era. The “Birkenau Cycle”, in which he depicts photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on four canvases and paints over them in several layers, is characteristic of this. Richter also addressed current political discourse in his works, for example in his collage-like “RAF Cycle”.

From the end of the 1960s, Richter devoted himself increasingly to abstraction, until he developed the squeegee technique for himself in the 1970s. This technique allowed him to apply several layers of paint on top of each other, so that not only could dynamic, expressive colors and forms be created by chance, but the materiality of the work was also emphasized.