Gerhard Richter German, b. 1932

Gerhard Richter, widely regarded as one of the most influential contemporary artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, is a German visual artist known for his prolific and stylistically diverse approach to painting. Born in Dresden in 1932, he grew up amid the wreckage of a nation and the clamour of ideological certainty. It is perhaps no wonder that his life’s work would come to resist the fixed and the absolute, moving instead through veils of ambiguity, replication and refusal. Few artists have mapped the tensions between seeing and knowing with such tenacity or grace.

 

He trained first in East Germany, at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, where socialist realism reigned. But it wasn’t until after his defection to the West in 1961 – slipping past the border just months before the Wall went up – that he encountered the kind of creative latitude that would shape his mature practice. At the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he met Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, and together they coined "Capitalist Realism", a sardonic rejoinder to both pop art and propaganda. Still, Richter would not be tethered long. His work – photorealistic, abstract, blurred, luminous – seems always to be trying to outrun its own intentions. Across six decades, Richter has made paintings that haunt the border between presence and disappearance. His blurred family portraits, scraped abstracts, and grey monochromes speak in different registers, but always return to the same unease: the slipperiness of truth, the failure of memory, the way history presses in like fog.

 

Richter’s work has been presented in numerous shows and retrospectives in prominent institutions worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Paris (1977, 2012); Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (1986) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1988, 2003); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1989, 2002); Tate, London (1991, 2011); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1993); Art Institute of Chicago (2002); Museum of Modern Art, New York; and National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2022). Richter has received numerous significant awards, including the Junger Western Art Prize (1961); Oskar Kokoschka Prize (1985); Goslarer Kaiserring (1988); Wolf Prize (1994); Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997); Praemium Imperiale Award (1997); Wexner Prize (1998); Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998); German Catholic Art and Culture Prize (2004). In 2007, he received honorary citizenship of Cologne and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012. In 2023, Berlin’s Nationalgalerie unveiled Gerhard Richter: 100 Works for Berlin, a gesture not of closure but of anchoring, however temporarily, a career that has so often hovered between fidelity and flight.