Background

Gerhard Richter was born on February 9, 1932 in Dresden, Germany. He is a son of Horst Richter, a teacher at a secondary school, and Hildegard Richter, a bookseller and a talented pianist.

Education

Gerhard Richter's family moved to Bogatynia, Poland (Reichenau at the time) in 1935 where Richter's father received a post at a school. So, Gerhard spent his childhood in the town.

In 1942, the little Gerhard was called in Hitler Youth, the youth organization of the Nazi Party but his age saved him from the subscription to the army.

Gerhard’s father, Horst Richter, took part in World War II on the eastern front and then on the western front where Allied forces captured him and detained until the end of the war. When Horst returned home, his family had moved in 1943 to a small village Waltersdorf in the Czech Republic. A young Gerhard felt uncomfortable at the village because of the dialect he couldn't speak.

At the end of the war, Gerhard started to read books forbidden under the Nazis. In a large part, these books of Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Feuchtwanger and about Diego Velázquez, Albrecht Dürer, Lovis Corinth influenced his future works.

Richter studied stenography, accounting and Russian at a higher professional school in Zittau, Germany. He finished school in 1948. During that time he became interested in painting, while in a summer camp. He created his first paintings, copies of books' illustrations, landscapes, self-portraits, some of them in watercolours.

In 1950, Gerhard Richter tried to enter the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden but his first attempt was unsuccessful. He finally became its student in the summer of 1951 and was taught by Karl von Appen, Heinz Lohmar, and Will Grohmann.

Except for drawing classes, the Academy had such disciplines as art history, Russian, politics and economics which Gerhard didn't love much. The part of his thesis project was to create a wall painting for the Academy's refectory and to paint a mural, named Joy of Life, for the German Hygiene Museum what he did perfectly and graduated in 1956 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Later, Richter also studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Arts Academy of Düsseldorf) under Karl Otto Gotz. In 2001, he received an Honorary Doctorate degree from the Catholic University of Louvain.

Career

Gerhard Richter's career began in 1948 when he started to work as an apprentice of a sign painter in Zittau, Saxony, Germany. A year later, in February, Richter became a scenery painter at the local municipal theatre, and worked there for around six months. In October, he occupied the post of a sign painter at DEWAG in Zittau serving in that capacity till 1951. Then, Gerhard worked independently for some time.

In 1957 he received a position of a master trainee in an academy. During four years on this post, the artist created such paintings as the mural Workers' Struggle, a Dresden's panorama called Townscape, portraits of Angelica Domrose, an East German actress, and of his first wife, Marianne Eufinger.

In 1959, Gerhard Richter draw a mural of the Socialist Unity Party's headquarters in Dresden, Germany. Richter discovered an artistic niche for himself by using trivial photographs as source material during the next decade. He used personal snapshots for portraits and family scenes as well as images from the mass media, and by deliberately blurring the image while painting created a certain distance from the pictorial content. These works include Helga Matura (1961), Cityscape Madrid (1968), Forty-eight Portraits (1971–72), portraits of composers Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, of writers Herbert George Wells and Franz Kafka.

On 8-30 September of 1962, the painter took part in his first professional exhibition called M. Kuttner – G. Richter: Dusseldorf at Galerie Junge Kunst in Germany. After it, Richter destroyed the works which had been shown. A year later, the artist participated in two other exhibitions in Dusseldorf, such as Kuttner, Lueg, Polke, Richter, and Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism. His first solo exhibition was organized in 1964 from 9 to 30 September at Galerie Schmela, in Dusseldorf.

Gerhard Richter combined his painting activity with the creation of different books, related with painting art. His first book, Polke/Richter: Richter/Polke, in collaboration with Sigmar Polke, appeared in 1965.

After the photorealistic works, the first Color Charts (1964) came. It was based on one of his own colour photographs, the monochrome Gray Paintings, in which he experimented with different ways of applying paint, and the colored Inpaintings (1972), which were completely void of representation.

In 1967, Richter began to use glass and made his first glass construction, Four Panes of Glass. In 1970, together with Blinky Palermo, he developed and proposed glass designs for 1972 Olympic Games in Munich but the proposal was made too late, the building had already been completed.

Richter taught at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg for some time. In 1971, he returned to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he worked as a professor for over fifteen years.

Gerhard Richter then moved on to a series of pastose landscape pictures, Mountains and Townscapes, as well as to the romanticized Landscapes, Seascapes, and Clouds for which he used highly transparent washes, common to all of these series is the absence of people.

In 1976, he put this new direction aside and started over again with abstract works this time painted without source images. Richter created such abstract works as Soft Abstracts, Wild Abstracts, Abstract Painting, 128 Photographs of a Picture, both of 1978, Stroke paintings (1979-80), Yellow-Green (1982), and others.

In Summer of 1978, the painter was invited to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Canada as a visiting professor. Two years later, along with his future second wife, Isa Genzken, Richter started a decoration project of the underground station at König-Heinrich-Platz, Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, consisting of a sequence of coloured panels and mirrors. The project wasn't completed because of some construction delays. The next Richter's book, Ice, was published in The Galleria Pieroni, Rome, in 1981. It reflected his ten-day trip to Greenland.

The year of 1984 became defining in Richter's career. In an exhibition called In From Here: Two Months of New German Art in Düsseldorf that took place in Messegelande, Dusseldorf, Richter presented his Abstract Paintings and Landscapes. He finally entered the international art market after this picture-show.

Gerhard Richter continued to work in abstract style, and in 1987, he began to overpaint photographs for the first time. These Overpainted Photographs were first presented to the public at the exhibition organized in 1993. They were later shown at Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany, during the exhibition of 2008.

In 1991, Richter received and completed a commission of a design project for the Hypovereinsbank, Dusseldorf, Germany. Two years later, the next Richter's book, Gerhard Richter: Text, saw publication. It consisted of his writings and was edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The volume was followed by The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews in 1995. The next year, Gerhard moved to a studio designed by architect Thiess Marwede.

In 2002, the metropolitan chapter of Cologne Cathedral, Germany, invited Gerhard Richter to elaborate the design for the restoration of one of its construction element destroyed during the Second World War. This project, named the Cologne Cathedral Window, consisting of more than 11,000 mouth-blown glass squares in seventy-two different colors, was finished on August, 25 in 2007. It was accompanied by the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Chance – 4900 Colours and Designs for the Cologne Cathedral Window at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.

Richter's painting September, created in 2005, was inspired by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on September, 11, 2001.

Richter created his next book, War Cut, in 2004. The book includes the photographs of 216 details of Abstract Painting combined with text about the Iraq War taken from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Then, the artist continued to work on abstract canvases. He also worked with enamel, and created such projects as the Sinbad series (2008), the Perizade, and Ifrit series (2010).

One more Richter's book with his color illustrations and short explanatory text, called Patterns, appeared in 2011.

In 2013, Richter returned to glass and produced several new glass sculptures including 7 Panes (House of Cards) and 12 Panes. The next year, Gerhard Richter embarked upon the four paintings Birkenau based on the photographs taken by prisoners of the Birkenau concentration camp. These paintings were exhibited for the first time in 2015.

Gerhard Richter's 85th birthday in 2017 was marked by many big solo exhibitions around the world in Prague, Cologne, Essen, Ghent and Moscow, demonstrating his early works and new abstract works. His first solo exhibition in Australia, in Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art, was organized as a part of the events.

One of the latest Richter's works is Foucault pendulum and 4 rectangular colored glass plates, given to the former Dominican church in Munster, Germany, deconsecrated on 12 November 2017.

Achievements

• Gerhard Richter is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. He is a talented and prosperous contemporary artist whose activity was widely recognized around the whole world.
  
  Richter's works are included in Fundamental Painting at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (Gray Paintings) and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, Germany, established The Gerhard Richter Archive in 2005. In 2010, two rooms, dedicated to Richter's work, were opened at The Albertinum, Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden, Germany. In 2012, Gerhard Richter's graphic works were exhibited at Musée du Louvre in Paris. In 2016, on the Japanese Island of Toyoshima, a pavilion with the permanent installation 14 Panes of Glass for Toyoshima was established.
  
  Along with Sigmar Polke, Richter invented the term Capitalistic Realism which designates anti-style of art and, at the same time, the realist style of art known as Socialist Realism.
  
  Many writers and musicians created his works in honor of Gerhard Richter. One of his paintings was used by Sonic Youth as the cover for their album Daydream Nation in 1988. Other works dedicated to the artist include the concert of The Ensemble Musikfabrik with specifically composed music for its 25-year anniversary, and an evening of German music called Reprise with a set of songs written by Paul Grabowsky on February 3, 2018 specially confined to the exhibition Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images in Brisbane.
  
  On September 8, 2011, a TV documentary about the artist and his activity, Gerhard Richter Painting, was released.
  
  Richter has been a recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Praemium Imperiale and the Golden Lion of Venice Biennale.
  
  In 2001, he became an honored citizen of Cologne. His name was entered in the city's Golden Book. According to Manager Magazin, Richter was 220 from one million of the richest individuals and families in Germany in 2017.

Works

More photos

• artwork

  • Motorboat

    1965

• book

  • Polke/Richter: Richter/Polke

    (This German-only publication documents the seminal joint ...)

    2014
  • War Cut

    (Originally published only in German in 2004, this long-aw...)

    2013
  • Eis

    (Eis combines German-only encyclopedia texts on Arctic reg...)

    2011
  • Text 2009
  • Patterns 2012

• painting

  • Mouth (Brigitte Bardot's Lips)

    1963

  • Phantom Interceptors

    1964

  • Dark

    1968

  • Passage

    1968

  • Townscape Madrid

    1968

  • Colour Streaks

    1968

  • Cube on Lawnchair

    1969

  • Seascape (Cloudy)

    1969

  • Red Blue Yellow

    1972

  • 1024 Colours

    1973

  • Grey

    1974

  • Abstract Painting

    1976

  • October 18

    1977

  • Abstract Painting No. 439

    1978

  • Ice

    1981

  • Korn

    1982

  • Clouds

    1982

  • Meadowland

    1985

  • Untitled

    1987

  • Betty

    1988

  • Confrontation 1

    1988

  • Ice (4)

    1989

  • 19.3.92

    1992

  • Abstract Bilding

    1992

  • Abstract Painting 780-1

    1992

  • Ema (Nude on a Staircase)

    1992

  • Reader

    1994

  • Abstract Picture

    1994

  • Firenze

    2000

  • Lilies

    2000

  • Moritz

    2000

  • Sindbad

    2008

  • 17.3.92

  • 180 Colors

  • Abstract Painting 610-1

  • Abstract Painting 780-1

  • Abstract Painting 805-4

  • Abstract Painting No. 809-3

  • Abstract Picture

  • Art Poster

  • Basel 2

  • Candles

  • Courbet

  • Himalaya

  • Ice 2

  • Ludorff

  • Mediation

  • S. with Child

  • Station

  • Valery

  • Wallace Bournes

Religion

"Well, in the first place, I believe that you always have to believe. It's the only way; after all we both believe that we will do this exhibition. But I can't believe in God, as such, he's either too big or too small for me, and always incomprehensible, unbelievable."

Views

Quotations: "What shall I paint? How shall I paint? 'What' is the hardest thing because it is the essence. 'How' is easy by comparison. To start off with the 'How' is frivolous, but legitimate. Apply the 'How' and thus use the requirements of technique, the material and physical possibilities, in order to realize the intention. The intention: to invent nothing – no idea, no composition, no object, no form – and to receive everything: composition, object, form, idea, picture."

"Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God."

"Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth."

"The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source."

"Painting pictures is simply the official, the daily work, the profession, and in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits."

"When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals. Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate."

"I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)"

"Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture or even knowing what such a thing ought to look like. But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere, it might one day happen. And this hope is nurtured every time something appears, a scattered, partial, initial hint of something which reminds me of what I long for, or which conveys a hint of it – although often enough I have been fooled by a momentary glimpse that then vanishes, leaving behind only the usual thing."

"I have no motif, only motivation. I believe that motivation is the real thing, the natural thing, and that the motif is old-fashioned, even reactionary (as stupid as the question about the Meaning of Life)."

"It can be a work by Mondrian, a piece of music by Schönberg or Mozart, a painting by Leonardo, Barnett Newman or also Jackson Pollock. That's beautiful to me. But also nature. A person can be beautiful as well. And beauty is also defined as 'untouched'. Indeed, that's an ideal: that we humans are untouched and therefore beautiful."

"Nature/Structure. There is no more to say. In my pictures I reduce to that. But 'reduce' is the wrong word, because these are not simplifications. I can't verbalize what I am working on: to me, it is many-layered by definition; it is what is more important, what is more true."

"Illusion – or rather appearance, semblance – is the theme of my life (could be theme of speech welcoming freshmen to the Academy). All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible."

Membership

Gerhard Richter has been a member of Akademie der Künste, Berlin and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

  1998

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Viewed as a personal (and possibly professional) deficiency, Richter's drawing practice consisted of diligently documenting something that didn't work – namely a hand that couldn't draw properly. [...] Richter displaces the concept of the artist's hand with hard evidence of his own, wobbly, failed, and very material appendage." R. H. Lossin

Connections

Gerhard Richter was married three times. Marianne Eufinger became his first wife in 1957. Nine years later, she gave birth to his first daughter, Babette.

In 1982, Richter married Isa Genzken, a sculptor. In 1995, the artist formed a family with painter and graphic designer Sabine Moritz. The couple had two sons, Moritz and Theodor, and a daughter Ella Maria.

Father:

Horst Richter

Mother:

Hildegard Ritcher

Spouse:

Sabine Moritz-Ritcher

Sister:

Gisela Richter

Grandfather:

Ernst Alfred Schonfelder

ex-spouse:

Marianne Eufinger

ex-spouse:

Isa Genzken

Son:

Moritz Richter

He was born in 1995.

Son:

Theodor Richter

He was born in 2006.

Daughter:

Babette Richter

She was born in 1966.

Daughter:

Ella Maria Richter

She was born in 1996.

aunt:

Marianne Schonfelder

Friend:

Hanne Darboven

colleague:

Sigmar Polke

References

• Gerhard Richter Painting TV program about Gerhard Richter and his work filmed by Corinna Belz.
  2011
• Gerhard Richter. Panorama: A Retrospective First published on the occasion of the major retrospective exhibition that opened at Tate Modern in 2011, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is the most complete overview of the artist’s entire career to date.
  2016
• Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting In this book, enter noted curator Dietmar Elger presents the first biography of Gerhard Richter. Written with full access to Richter and his archives, it offers unprecedented insight into his life and work. The extensive interviews on which this book is based disclose Richter who is far more candid, personal, and vivid than ever before.
  2010
• Gerhard Richter The first collection of essays on Gerhard Richter, who has been called "the greatest modern painter."
  2009
• Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting A book by Robert Store.
  2002
• Gerhard Richter Official Website