Gerhard Richter was born on February 9, 1932, in Dresden and grew up in Waltersdorf (Upper Lusatia). From 1951 to 1956 he studied painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1959, Richter visited documenta II in Kassel, which, under the direction of Werner Haftmann, focused on abstract art created after 1945. He was particularly impressed by the works of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana. To escape the state-mandated "Socialist Realism" of the GDR, Gerhard Richter moved to West Germany in 1961.
From 1961 to 1963, Richter continued his painting studies at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he learned about informal painting techniques from Karl Otto Götz and painted Tachist works himself. He came into contact with the Fluxus movement and became acquainted with American Pop Art. He was friends with Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo. With Polke and Konrad Fischer-Lueg, the artist and later gallery owner, Gerhard Richter founded the group of "Capitalist Realists."
In 1963, they organized the happening "Living with Pop – A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism" in a Düsseldorf furniture store. Here, Gerhard Richter presented his "grey photo paintings" for the first time.
From 1962 onwards, Gerhard Richter numbered all his paintings consecutively. This resulted in an incredibly multifaceted and diverse oeuvre in which Richter repeatedly and fundamentally re-examined the medium of painting. For this, Richter used all kinds of source images, which he either reproduced realistically or overpainted in such a way that the original motif and its informational content were obscured, resulting in the series of "overpaintings."
In 1966, Gerhard Richter began working on the series of works entitled "Color Charts," using unchanged color tones which he placed side by side on the picture support, based on the model of commercially available color sample cards.
From 1967 to 1975, Richter created the "Grey Paintings," for which he exclusively used shades of grey in various structures and painting techniques. He repeatedly dedicated himself to a specific motif in a whole series of paintings, such as the "Seascapes" (1969-1976), the cloud paintings, or the Alpine paintings.
In 1972, Gerhard Richter represented Germany at the Venice Biennale, for which he painted the series "48 Portraits." His works were shown at all documenta VX exhibitions. To this day, numerous exhibitions take place both in Germany and abroad, the artist receives prestigious awards and art prizes, and is one of the most influential and internationally successful contemporary artists.
Gerhard Richter has lived and worked in Cologne since the early 1980s.
