Gerhard Richter – a century artist turned 80

This man has secured his place in art history: Gerhard Richter has turned 80. The genius of contemporary painting can thus look back on decades full of artistic drive and stylistic diversity.

His critics repeatedly interpreted precisely this sometimes provocative diversity as postmodern arbitrariness. But Gerhard Richter has long since established himself as an uncompromising master.

His painting “Betty”, a portrait of his daughter in a red and white floral coat, is seen by many as a modern counterpart to the “Mona Lisa”. Richter himself believes it to be the most reproduced painting in contemporary art, disseminated on posters, postcards and book covers.

His success is evidenced above all by his seven participations in Documenta and by auction prices of up to 15 million euros for his works. Furthermore, he was honored with a retrospective at MoMA in 2002, which, with 188 exhibits, was the largest exhibition ever dedicated to a living artist at the museum.

Appearance is his life's theme: the questionability of all knowledge that we claim from reality.

“See everything, understand nothing” is a motto of the Cologne painter, who turned 80 on February 9th. I would like to take his 80th birthday as an opportunity to examine Gerhard Richter the person and his work a little more closely.

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and grew up in Upper Lusatia. He also received his basic training in painting in Dresden, initially as a sign painter, stage and advertising painter, and later through studies at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

At the end of February 1961, he fled to West Germany via West Berlin. Unfortunately, only a few of his artworks from the time before his escape survived.

Richter continued his art studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1961 to 1964. After working as an art teacher in the late 1960s and being a visiting lecturer at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts in 1967, he was appointed professor of painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1971. He taught there until 1993.

During this time, his path crossed with Joseph Beuys, who was then his colleague. Richter intervened on Beuys' behalf, as Beuys had had his teaching license revoked by the then Minister of Education of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau.

Soon Richter's work was exhibited in numerous galleries and museums both in Germany and abroad. Gerhard Richter's international artistic recognition steadily increased in the following years, culminating in a comprehensive retrospective in 1993/1994, which toured Paris, Bonn, Stockholm, and Madrid.

Finally, in 2005, the Gerhard Richter Archive was established in Dresden, which, under the direction of Dietmar Elger, Richter's long-time assistant and biographer, is not only researching the life and work of the artist but also creating a new catalogue raisonné.

Richter's work was characterized above all by his experimentation with virtually all current forms of expression and styles of modern painting. He drew influences for the extensive body of work that developed after this phase from Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, but also from Neo-Dada and Fluxus.

Since the 1960s, it has also become typical for Gerhard Richterto use photographs as source material for his paintings. These are often incidental motifs from newspaper and magazine clippings (later also based on his own photographs), which he enlarged by copying and transferring to the canvas, predominantly in gray and white, thereby exaggerating them. This method, close to photorealism, is characterized by a blurred effect that distorts the realism of the source material.

In the reception of Richter's work, it is emphasized to what extent Richter's oeuvre appears full of contradictions and discontinuities: between photorealistic depictions of nature, the blurred paintings based on photographs and paintings of the highest abstraction, up to glass and mirror objects or installations.

It should be noted that these elements do not appear sequentially as developmental strands of the work. Richter repeatedly revisits these different approaches throughout his creative process. What clearly holds this work together is Richter's exploratory and experimental engagement with reality.

An interview with the publicity-shy painter can be found here:

The Neue Nationalgalerie and the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin are celebrating his 80th birthday with exhibitions running until May 13th. More information about the 20th-century genius Gerhard Richter can be found here.

Sources: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Stern, website of the Berlin State Museums, Wikipedia, Gerhard Richter's homepage, YouTube

Extensive collection of his works on Pinterest