GERHARD RICHTER

Early Life in Dresden

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 to a middle class family. Like many Germans of his generation, his relatives were involved in the Nazi movement; his mother's brother, Uncle Rudi died a young Nazi officer, while Richter's mentally disabled aunt was imprisoned in a Hitler euthanasia camp. Rigorous ideology and death have haunted Richter since he was just a child, perhaps causing his strong dislike for ideology of any kind and underpinning the attraction that nature, as an indiscriminate force, holds for him.

Support from his mother encouraged him to become an artist during his mid-teens and he embarked on a classical education at the Dresden Art Academy in Communist East Germany. Years later and a few months prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall, he and his wife fled with only a suitcase to Düsseldorf in West Germany. From 1961 to 1964, Richter studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Gotz.

An Influential Peer Group

During the early sixties Richter met and began to work with artists such as Sigmar Polke, Konrad Fischer-Lueg and Georg Baselitz. Their work, and Richter's in particular, began to have an impact in Germany, and eventually international art circles. Richter's beliefs are credited with refreshing art and rejuvenating painting as a medium during a period when many artists chose performance and ready-made media.

Together with Polke and Fischer-Lueg, Richter formed a group called the Capitalist Realists. The Capitalist Realists were satirical, often deriving subject matter from print media. Richter began to see art as something that had to be separated from art history; he believed that paintings should focus on the image rather than the reference, the visual rather than the statement. He wanted to find a new way of painting that would not be constricting. Richter emerged from the group to become one of the most sought after contemporary artists in the world. His work is regularly sold at auction, sometimes for millions.

The First Exhibition

Richter's first solo exhibition was held at Mobelhaus Berges, Düsseldorf in 1963. It was the first presentation of his photo-based painting style. Richter blurred the paintings, modernising traditional art through technique, and using photography as his source of material. These blurred paintings of photographs are close to reality but also contain a nostalgic distance, because the eye can never precisely capture the image being viewed, rather like trying to remember the features of a person whom one hasn't seen for a while. Only the outline is remembered, and the rest blurred. With his photo-based paintings of regular images, Richter has tried to subvert the hierarchy of art and the everyday. "I believe in nothing", he has said.

Artistic Accolades

In 1967 Richter won the Junger Westen Prize and began to paint the Colour Charts, Grey Paintings and Forty-Eight Portraits; the Colour Charts are structured on a pre-established system of colour determination, removing artistic whim; the grey paintings contain no interpretable images but are experiments in brushstroke and the application of paint; the portraits are images of intellectuals Richter selected from an encyclopedia.

In 1972 Richter was chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale. That same year, he exhibited at Documenta in Kassel, where he showed again in 1977, 1982 and 1987. At Documenta in 1982 Richter was awarded the Arnold Bode Prize and in 1985 in Vienna the Oskar Kokoschka Prize. To read a comprehensive list of Richter's exhibitions and awards, visit our exhibition page.

International Recognition

Richter's first exhibition in the U.S. took place at the Reinhard Onnasch Gallery in 1973. Fifteen years later in 1988 he was given his first North American retrospective organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2001 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited a retrospective of Richter's paintings called "Forty Years of Painting". Curated by Robert Storr, the exhibition was critically acclaimed.

A Diverse Range of Styles

The 2001 Retrospective at MOMA displayed how diverse Richter's paintings are. His early work is of blurred figurative paintings, both with and without colour followed by seductive abstract paintings, with a colour palette that is either brilliant or subdued. His surprisingly diverse range of work has received prolonged discussion from critics, especially due to Richter's disregard for "traditional" stylistic progression and his use of photographs.

Beauty in the Ordinary

Unlike American artists Richter wasn't interested in the purity of art. Idealism had disillusioned him from an early age. Instead he painted images without glory; images that rendered the ridiculous, ordinary; the tragic, ordinary; the beautiful, ordinary. Throughout his career Richter has shrunk from giving a psychological insight into his art, leaving his admirers and critics guessing and at times confused. According to him, his work forms from structures and ideas that surround him, nothing more profound than that.

Colour and Light

In August 2007 Gerhard Richter's new stained glass window for the south transept of Cologne Cathedral was unveiled. The original window was destroyed in World War II and had been replaced with plain glass. Inspired by Richter's 1974 painting "4096 Farben", the window consists of around 11,500 hand-blown glass squares in 72 different colours. Echoing the colours of the surrounding windows, Richter's illuminated abstraction blends a modernist aesthetic with the Gothic ecclesiastical architecture of the cathedral.

Richter, a resident of the catheral city since the early 1980s, was made an honorary citizen of Cologne in April 2007.

Extracts from Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings 1962-1993

1962

Art serves to establish community. It links us with others, and with the things around us, in a shared vision and effort.

My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for.

Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going, being lost, being a loser, reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.

1964

Photography altered ways of seeing and thinking. Photographs were regarded as true, paintings as artificial. The painted picture was no longer credible; its representation froze into immobility, because it was not authentic but invented.

The first time I painted from a photograph, I did so in a mixture of exhilaration and fear, partly because I was strongly affected by contemporary Fluxus events, and partly also because I once did a lot of photography myself and worked for a photographer for eighteen months: masses of photographs that passed through the bath of developer every day may have created a lasting trauma. There must be other reasons. I can't tell exactly.

I want to have everything very clear, simple and unconditional, and I would rather no art at all than just any old unspecific painting.

I want to leave everything as it is. I therefore neither plan nor invent; I add nothing and omit nothing. At the same time, I know that I inevitably shall plan, invent, alter, make and manipulate. But I don't know that.

I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing: nor is it an identity tag for my pictures. When I dissolve demarcations and create transitions, this is not in order to destroy the representation, or to make it more artistic or less precise. The flowing transitions, the smooth, equalizing surface, clarify the content and make the representation credible (an alla prima impasto would be too reminiscent of painting, and would destroy the illusion).

1970

Art can [be] truly relevant only when it isn't directly employed to do a job. If art represents itself, society can use it; but not if it advertises anything. Then it's advertising design. All this has nothing to do with 'Art for Art's Sake'. There is no such thing as 'Art for Art's Sake'

What painters have you learned from? From every one that I know.Interview with Peter Sager, 1972

1973

One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is total idiocy. From Richter, 'Notes 1973

1975

When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over I did so because I did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful. As time went on, however, I observed differences of quality among grey surfaces, and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it. Destitution became a constructive statement; it became relative perfection, beauty, and therefore painting.From a letter de Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975

1977

...why no more Photo Pictures? New interests came up, more attractive and more exclusively to do with painting, and these made me forgot about photography. So then came other things: Colour Charts, Grey Pictures and now Abstract Pictures.

Of course photography has influenced the way we see, and also this photographic way of picture-making suits me; it is so the antithesis of 'painting', the act of painting that was formerly almost as important as the outcome, the finished picture. Interview with Amine Hasse 1977

1988

I was impressed by the terrorists' energy, their uncompromising determination and their absolute bravery; but I could not find it in my heart to condemn the State for its harsh response. That is what States are like; and I had known other, more ruthless ones.

The deaths of terrorists, and the related events both before and after, stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my efforts to suppress it. Notes for a press conference, November-December 1988

1989

Without a doubt, ideologies are harmful, and we must therefore take them very seriously; as behaviour, and not for their content (in content, they are all equally false). Notes 1989

1990

In 1976 you began to paint small abstract painting, because you wanted something that you couldn't visualize in advance. In doing so, you invented a method that was absolutely new to you. Was that an experiment of some kind? Yes. It began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to what I had never let myself do; put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part. Interview with Sabine Schutz, 1990

Notes 1992

For about a year now, I have been unable to [do] anything in my painting but scrape off, pile on and then remove again. In this process I don't actually reveal what was beneath. If I wanted to do that, I would have to think what to reveal (figurative pictures or signs or patterns); that is, pictures that might as well be produced direct. It would also be something of a symbolic trick: bringing to light the lost, buried pictures, or something to that effect. Notes 1992

Notes 1993

The image of the artist as a misunderstood figure is abhorrent to me. I much prefer the high times, as in the Renaissance or in Egypt, where art was part of the social order and was needed in the present. The suffering, unappreciated Van Gogh is not my ideal. Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, 1993

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