Artists Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter

German Painter

Movements and Styles: Pop Art, Postmodernism

Born: February 9, 1932 - Dresden, Germany

Table of contents

> Synopsis
> Key Ideas
> Most Important Art
> Biography
Influences and Connections
Resources

Quotes

"Photography altered ways of seeing and thinking. Photographs were regarded as true, paintings as artificial. The painted picture was no longer credible; its representation froze into immobility, because it was not authentic but invented."

Gerhard Richter

"I want to leave everything as it is. I therefore neither plan nor invent; I add nothing and omit nothing. At the same time, I know that I inevitably shall plan, invent, alter, make and manipulate. But I don't know that."

Gerhard Richter

"Gray is the color.. the most important of all.. absent of opinion, nothing, neither/nor."

Gerhard Richter

"I'm still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.

Gerhard Richter

"Every museum is full of nice things. That's the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things."

Gerhard Richter

"I believe in painting and I believe in eating too. What can we do? We have to eat, we have to pain, we have to live. Of course, there are different ways to survive. But it's my best option."

Gerhard Richter

"I don't dare to think my paintings are great. I can't understand the arrogance of someone saying, 'I have created a big, important work.'"

Gerhard Richter

"What I'm attempting in each picture is nothing other than this...to bring together in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom."

Synopsis

Gerhard Richter is a German painter who originally trained in a realist style and later developed an appreciation for the more progressive work of his American and European contemporaries. Richter increasingly employed his own painting as a means for exploring how images that appear to capture "truth" often prove, on extended viewing, far less objective, or unsure in meaning, than originally assumed. The other common themes in his work are the elements of chance, and the play between realism and abstraction. Working alongside but never fully embracing a quick succession of late-20^th-century art movements, such as Abstract Expressionism, American/British Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, Richter has absorbed many of their ideas while remaining skeptical of all grand artistic and philosophical credos.

Key Ideas

Richter has maintained a lifelong fascination for the power of images and painting's long, uneasy relationship with photography: while either medium may claim to reflect or express reality truthfully, either ultimately suggests only a partial, or incomplete view of a subject.

Richter borrows much of his painted imagery from newspapers, or even his own family albums. Often he begins by mechanically projecting such an image onto the canvas, a technique for thinking about how images often seem to have a life of their own, like mysterious ghosts haunting our psyche. This act of visual compression, in which photography, projection, and painting merge to make a finished art work, suggests that all vision is a kind of conversion of the "real" into the "imaginary."

Richter would often blur his subjects and embrace chance effects in his own painting process in order to show the impossibility of any artist conveying the full truth of a subject in its original condition. Such means for suggesting that something essential to the model has been "lost in translation" often leads a viewer's attention to the oil pigment's dense, material nature, thereby demonstrating both its expressive strengths and shortcomings.

In Richter's completely abstract canvases, personal emotion and all traces of the painter's autobiography seem missing. The painting's many layers, strokes, and scrapes of color may thus appear as "beautiful" as anything found in nature that came into existence partly according to a predetermined structure (such as DNA), as well as by way of unpredictable occasions of pure chance and the action of outside forces.

Biography

Childhood

Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, during the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or the Nazi Third Reich. Notably, some of Richter's relatives were directly involved in the Nazi movement, namely his father, a schoolteacher, and an uncle. Richter's mother, the daughter of a concert pianist, encouraged her son's early talent for draftsmanship. In 1948, at the age of 16, Richter quit his formal education and took up an apprenticeship as a set painter for the theater. The wake of war proved traumatic for Richter: two of his uncles had been killed in action, and his father had lost his employment. This family turmoil, coupled with the artist's early artistic training under postwar communist-driven ideology, eventually led Richter to seek his creative inspiration in nature over any political or religious affairs or philosophies.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Gerhard Richter Biography Continues

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Artists, Friends, Movements

Influenced by Artist

Artists, Friends, Movements

Interactive chart with Gerhard Richter's main influences, and the people and ideas that the artist influenced in turn.

View Influences Chart

Artists

	Max Beckmann
	Jackson Pollock
	Lucio Fontana
	Robert Rauschenberg
	Andy Warhol

Personal Contacts

	Joseph Beuys
	Georg Baselitz
	Sigmar Polke
	Konrad Fischer-Lueg

Movements

	Pop Art
	Abstract Expressionism
	Fluxus
	Dada

Influences on Artist

Gerhard Richter

Years Worked: 1951 - Present

Influenced by Artist

Artists

	Christopher Wool
	Ellsworth Kelly

Personal Contacts

	Sigmar Polke
	Blinky Palermo
	Robert Storr

Movements

	Conceptual Art
	Minimalism

If you see an error or typo, please:

tell us

Cite this page

Content compiled and written by Larissa Borteh

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Larissa Borteh
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
Available from:
[Accessed ]