RICHTER, Gerhard

About the German artist, Gerhard RICHTER (*1932 in Dresden).

Gerhard RICHTER is a painter, sculptor and photographer. He graduated from the secondary commercial school in Zittau in 1948 with the Mittlere Reife and was trained there from 1949 to 1951 as a sign painter and stage and advertising painter. In 1950 his application for admission to the Dresden College of Fine Arts was rejected. In 1951 he was able to begin his studies at the art academy there. His mural for the refectory of the Dresden Academy, created in 1955 for his intermediate diploma, was painted over after his escape (1961). He continued his art studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy until 1964. Among his fellow students in Götz's class were Sigmar Polke, HA Schult and Gotthard Graubner. In 1971 he received a professorship for painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Here he taught until 1993. 
In the early 1960s Gerhard RICHTER used photographs as models for paintings for the first time, a method he used regularly thereafter. These were incidental motifs from newspaper and magazine clippings (later also based on his own photographs), which he enlarged by painting, transferred to the canvas predominantly in gray and white and thus exaggerated. This method is characterized by a blurred effect that alienates the realism of the originals. Stefan Germer pointed out that Gerhard RICHTER used his art "less to produce new images than to reflect on existing ones." Next to the paintings of photos of banal objects are paintings of contemporary historical persons or events that, in Richter's words, "show my present' these include sports cars, motorboats and military planes, secretaries, the prostitute Helga Matura, the euthanasia perpetrator Werner Heyde, the related Uncle Rudi in his Wehrmacht uniform, and the Kennedy assassin Oswald. This 'epoch' found its final climax in the so-called RAF cycle 'October 18, 1977'.

Books by and about Gerhard RICHTER

• 'On Richter's October Pictures ' (1991); '128 Photos of a Picture 1978' (1998); 'October 18, 1977' (2000); 'Landscapes' (2002); 'Sindbad' (2008); 'Wald' (2008); 'Overpainted Photographs' (2008); 'Inside The Studio' (2008, photographed by Erika KIFFL); 'December. 39 Stories. 39 pictures' (2010, together with Alexander Kluge); 'Eis' (2011); 'Gerhard Richter at work' (2012, photographed by Benjamin KATZ); 'Message of quiet moments. 89 stories. 64 pictures' (2013, together with A.Kluge); '93 details from my picture Birkenau' (2015); 'Birkenau' (2016); 'Leben und Werk' (2019, 2022); 'Landschaft' (2020); 'Jedes Bild ist ein Spiegel / Every picture is a mirror'. Conversations with Hans Ulrich Obrist' (2021); 'Künstlerbücher / Artist's Books. 1966-2021' (2022); 'Engadin' (2024);