Gerhard Richter - A artist of the century was 80 years

This man secured his rank in the history of art: Gerhard Richter was 80 years old. The annual gods of contemporary painting can thus look back on decades full of artistic creation urge and stylistic diversity.

It is precisely these partly provocative variety that its critics kept exposing it as postmodern arbitrariness. But Gerhard Richter has long since asserted himself as a uncompromising expert.

His picture "Betty" , a portrait of the daughter in the red-white-flowered coat, see many as a modern counterpart to the " Mona Lisa " . Richter himself believes that it is the most printed painting of contemporary art, spreads on posters, postcards and book covers.

His success is documented primarily by his seven -time participation in Documenta and through auction prices of up to 15 million euros for his works. He was also ennobled by a MOMA retrospective in 2002. With 188 exhibits, the exhibition, which was ever dedicated to a living artist, was shown there.

The appearance is his life topic: the question of all knowledge that we claim from reality.

"See everything, understand nothing" is a slogan of the Cologne painter, who turned 80 on February 9th. I would now like to take his 80th birthday as an opportunity to take a closer look at the person Gerhard Richter and his work.

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and then grew up in Oberlausitz. In Dresden, he also acquired his basic training in painting, initially as a font and stage and advertising gallery in the form of a degree at the art academy there.

At the end of February 1961 he fled to West Germany via West Berlin. Unfortunately, only a few of his works of art remained from his time before fleeing.

From 1961 to 1964, judge continued his art studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. After working as an art teacher at the end of the 1960s and was a guest lecturer at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in 1967, he received a professorship for painting in 1971 at the Düsseldorf art academy. Here he taught until 1993.

During this time his path crossed Joseph Beuys , who was his colleague at the time. Judge was committed to him because Beuys had been withdrawn from the then North Rhine-Westphalian Minister of Culture Johannes Rau.

Richter was soon presented in many domestic and foreign galleries and museums. Gerhard Richter's international artistic recognition increased steadily in the years, so that in 1993/1994 he was dedicated to a comprehensive retrospective with stations in Paris, Bonn, Stockholm and Madrid.

Finally, the Gerhard Richter Archive was launched in Dresden in 2005, which, in addition to the research of the life and work of the artist, also created a new list of work under the direction of Dietmar Elger, Richter's long -time assistant and biographers.

Richter's work was characterized by the fact that he tried practically all current forms of expression and styles of modern painting. Influences for the extensive work, which develops according to this phase, moved from pop art , from abstract expressionism , but also from neo-dada and fluxus.

Since the 1960s it has also been typical of Gerhard Richter to use photographs as templates for paintings. These are often casual motifs from newspaper and illustrated excerpts (later also based on his own recordings), which it later enlarged and mainly transferred to the screen in gray-white and thus exaggerated. This method, which is close to photo realism, is characterized by a blurred blurring that alienates the realism of the templates.

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 are not one after the other as development lines of the work. Judge repeatedly takes up these different approaches during his creative phase. What is obviously holding together is Richter's research and experimenting dealing with reality.

You can find an interview with the public -shy painter here:

The new National Gallery and the Old National Gallery in Berlin celebrate its 80th birthday with exhibitions until May 13th. You can find more information on the century genius Gerhard Richter here .

Sources: Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Stern, HP of the State Museums in Berlin, Wikipedia, homepage by Gerhard Richter, YouTube

Extensive collection of his works on Pinterest