Gerhard Richter
The painter who turned ambiguity into method — moving between photorealism and pure abstraction within a single career without ever resolving the contradiction.
Gerhard Richter emerged from postwar Germany to become one of the most consequential painters of the late twentieth century. His work refuses categorisation: he produces blurred photo-paintings of newspaper clippings, squeegee-dragged colour fields, grey monochrome panels, and photo-based portraiture — sometimes within the same decade. The refusal to settle is the point.
Formation in two Germanys
Richter trained at the Kunstakademie in Dresden under East Germany's Socialist Realist orthodoxy, then defected to the West in 1961, weeks before the Berlin Wall was sealed. In Düsseldorf he encountered Fluxus and the emerging Capitalist Realism group — alongside Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg — which used consumer imagery as critical material. From that friction Richter developed his central strategy: painting from photographs, then blurring the result, stripping the image of certainty without destroying it.
The photo-paintings
Beginning in the early 1960s, Richter transferred amateur photographs — family snapshots, press images, found pictures — onto canvas in monochrome or muted colour, then dragged a dry brush across the wet surface to create his signature soft focus. Works such as Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (1966) and the 48 Portraits series (1971–72) expose the photograph's claim to truth as fiction: the blur neither confirms nor denies. His October 18, 1977 cycle — eighteen paintings based on press photographs of the Baader-Meinhof group's deaths — applied the same method to charged political material, producing images of grief that resist all easy readings.1
The abstractions
Parallel to the figurative work, Richter developed a practice of large-scale abstraction using squeegees and wide-bladed tools to layer, scrape, and drag oil paint across enormous canvases. Works in this vein — gathered under the title Abstraktes Bild — are not expressionist confessions; they are records of physical process, chance, and decision-making. Richter has consistently refused to grant abstraction any spiritual authority, treating it as another mode of image production rather than a higher truth.
Legacy and market
Richter's influence on subsequent painting is pervasive — in Germany, the United States, and Britain, artists absorbed his lesson that figuration and abstraction need not choose sides. Several of his works have broken auction records for living artists. His archive project, Atlas, collects the thousands of photographs, sketches, and clippings that underlie his production, functioning as a meta-commentary on image culture itself.
| Mode | Characteristic technique | Representative series |
|---|---|---|
| Photo-painting | Monochrome, wet-brush blur | 48 Portraits, October 18, 1977 |
| Abstraction | Squeegee drag, layered oil | Abstraktes Bild |
| Glass works | Industrial glass panes | Museum and institutional commissions |
I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no programme, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations, but unknown, changing, contradictory impressions and ideas.
Footnotes
- The series was first shown at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1988 and is now held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. ↩
