Gerhard Richter

Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932, Gerhard Richter currently lives and works in Cologne. He is one of the most prestigious artists in the world. Since the early sixties, when the death of painting was being announced, Richter has been exploring the medium through a variety of languages (Informalism, Realism and Abstract Expressionism) and genres (portrait, landscape, still life, geometry and gestural abstraction). Richter was educated in the German Democratic Republic under the dictates of Soviet Social Realism. His participation in Kassel’s Documenta II in 1959 introduced him to the abstract work of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana and encouraged him to move to the West and to the city of Düsseldorf in 1961. There he studied at the prestigious Düsseldorf Art Academy where he met members of the Fluxus group and artists such as Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and the West-German dealer Konrad Fischer. In 1962 Richter fused painting and photography in his renowned ‘photo-paintings’. The first, painted that same year, was Tisch (Table), an oil painting of a press image. With this work he began the archive Atlas, an extensive ongoing index where the artist keeps all the images relating to his work, especially those he uses as sources. In his photo-paintings, Richter translates amateur photographs into paintings, thus subverting even further any notions of a personal or singular style. His use of a dry brush on the wet surface of the canvas creates a blurred and ephemeral effect that relates to the historical condition of both those media: the transparency of photography and the self-referentiality of painting. Richter’s grey hues are in sharp contrast to his choice of intimate subjects or subjects relating to historical representation.