Gerhard Richter

He has been called the "world's greatest living painter" and "the twenty-first century's Picasso".  From his early art to his most recent works, Gerhard Richter has given us art that both amazes us and makes us think.

Born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, he miraculously survived the Allied bombing of that city in 1945, which took on the order of 25,000 lives.  Kurt Vonnegut, the American writer, was a POW in Dresden and also survived that bombing.  Their future works would reflect the trauma of those days.  

Vonnegut survived by hiding in a slaughterhouse meat locker with other POWs. This became the foundation for his seminal 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, which blends science fiction with his personal account of the destruction to create a powerful anti-war statement on the absurdity and horror of conflict. 

Although Richter rarely speaks directly about the trauma, the destruction of Dresden left a lasting imprint on his psyche and artistic vision. His works—especially the Townscapes and Bombers series—reflect themes of ruin, memory, and the ambiguity of historical representation. He once remarked that these paintings seemed to recall “images of the destruction of Dresden during the war”. -[Below Right, Townscape Statbild, 1969]

Gerhard Richter escaped East Germany in 1961 - one year before the construction of the Berlin Wall.  He settled in Düsseldorf, where he was exposed to Western avant-garde movements, including Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism—styles that were suppressed in East Germany. 

Table from 1962 [below left] marks Richter’s first major departure from photorealism and his initial experiment with abstraction. It began as a figurative image of a table, but he painted over it so extensively that the original subject is nearly obliterated.  The work explores erasure, memory, and the instability of meaning — core ideas that would inform his abstract works.  Richter later said that “Table” was a breakthrough moment, showing him that destruction could be a form of creation. This concept—of layering, obscuring, and reworking—became central to his abstract paintings, especially the large squeegee works of the 1980s and beyond.

Kitchen Chair from 1965 depicts a simple wooden chair stood in front of a light-colored wall. The dark floor contrasts against the wall, upon which a strong light from the right-hand side casts the chair's shadow.  It joins other early works by the artist that take banal everyday objects as subjects, in the tradition of Pop Art. 

The 1970s were a period of transition.  Not yet fully abstract, many paintings from the early years of the decade are blurred - a practice foreshadowed in his 1965 painting, Aunt Marianne.  In the blurred photo, Marianne, who was euthanized by the Nazis because of her alleged mental illness. is holding the baby Gerhard. 

Brigid Polk (1971) was part of the Andy-Warhol pop art scene.  At the other end of the cultural spectrum is Annunciation After Titian (1973).  In the former painting, Richter evokes the hazy glamour and detachment of celebrity culture. The blur suggests both intimacy and distance, as if recalling a fading memory of a cultural moment.  In blurring the Annunciation, Richter transforms a moment of divine clarity into a meditation on doubt, memory, and the limits of representation.

Richter’s blur refuses to offer certainty or closure. It mirrors how memory works—fragmented, unstable—and challenges viewers to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it.   Richter’s blur is ethical:  Memory is selective.  Who and what do we remember? Why do we remember these? Ethical remembrance honors those who suffered or were silenced. It asks: Are we remembering for justice, for healing, or for less virtuous reasons like profit or spectacle or vengeful hatred?

The late 70s and early 80s saw Richter develop his "squeegee" method, and his paintings gradually took on a more abstract quality. This method involves applying paint with wide brushes and then spreading, rubbing, and scraping it with the squeegee. The result is a blurred effect where areas of color blend into one another, giving impressions ranging from an out-of-focus photograph to an Abstract Impressionist masterwork.

By the mid-80s, Gerhard Richter's painting had evolved to almost total abstraction.  On the left are examples of his work for each decade from the 1980s to the 21st century.  The Abstraktes Bild, from 1986, sold at auction in 2015 for $46.3 million, making Richter the most expensive living artist in Europe.  The Cage Series from 2006 was inspired by the music of composer John Cage.  As the Tate Museum website notes: "Richter was listening to the music of John Cage while he worked on these paintings and titled them after the composer. There are no direct links between any particular work in this series and any piece of music by Cage. However, Richter has long been interested in Cage’s ideas about ambient sound and silence, as well as his controlled use of chance procedures in musical composition."

Sotheby's YouTube video [left] describes the squeegee method of this "painter without a brush" and why it is not as haphazard as it seems.

We close with a few words about two of this amazing artist's other works. 

Gerhard Richter's Atlas is a collection of photographs, newspaper cuttings and sketches that the artist has been assembling since the mid 1960s.  This vast ongoing project consists of over 5,000 photographs, sketches, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera that he has compiled or created since 1962. It functions as a massive, conceptual sketchbook, offering insight into the artist's diverse interests, visual sources, and the processes behind his paintings and other works. The collected materials, arranged in panels, explore themes from personal and historical events to abstract visual ideas.