Gerhard Richter German, b. 1932

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) stands as one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in postwar and contemporary art. Born in Dresden, Germany, Richter’s career spans over six decades, during which he has persistently defied stylistic categorization. His work navigates a complex terrain between figuration and abstraction, realism and illusion, history and personal memory. Often described as a “painter of images about images,” Richter interrogates the very nature of representation and challenges the boundaries of traditional painting.

Richter began his artistic training in East Germany under the constraints of Socialist Realism but defected to West Germany in 1961, shortly before the Berlin Wall was erected. There, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and became associated with a generation of artists, including Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, who were responding to both the legacy of German history and the rise of American Pop Art. Early in his West German career, Richter began his renowned “photo-paintings”—grisaille canvases based on personal snapshots, newspaper clippings, and historical photographs—which blur the lines between photography and painting through his signature technique of soft-focus brushwork.

Richter’s oeuvre encompasses a vast range of media and styles: from the emotive color charts and monochromes of the 1970s, to large-scale abstractions achieved through layered scraping techniques, to politically charged works like the October 18, 1977 cycle, which depicts the deaths of members of the Red Army Faction. His engagement with themes of memory, trauma, and truth has prompted comparisons to historical painters like Goya and Velázquez, as well as modernist figures such as Duchamp and Picasso.

What distinguishes Richter in the art historical canon is not only his technical mastery but his conceptual rigor. By continuously shifting his approach and questioning the authenticity of visual representation, Richter reflects the broader tensions of the 20th and 21st centuries—particularly Germany’s fraught historical landscape and the saturation of imagery in the modern age. His work resists easy interpretation, embodying what critic Robert Storr called “a skepticism that does not lapse into cynicism.”

Today, Gerhard Richter’s paintings are housed in major institutions worldwide, and his market presence is among the strongest of any living artist. Yet despite his fame, Richter remains reticent, allowing the ambiguity and plurality of his work to speak in place of a singular narrative. As such, he occupies a unique position in art history: at once a traditional painter and a postmodern provocateur, a documentarian of images and a destroyer of illusions.