54 Facts About Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction, with him being the most expensive living painter at one time.

Gerhard Richter was born in Hospital Dresden-Neustadt in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up in Reichenau, and in Waltersdorf, in the Upper Lusatian countryside, where his father worked as a village teacher.

Gerhard Richter never became an avid supporter of Nazism, and was not required to attend party rallies.

When he was 10 years old, Gerhard was conscripted into the Deutsches Jungvolk; the Hitler Youth, for teenage boys, was dissolved at the end of the war, before Richter reached the age of enlistment.

Gerhard Richter left school after 10th grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

Gerhard Richter finally began his studies at the Academy in 1951.

Gerhard Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957; she gave birth to his first daughter.

Gerhard Richter married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982.

Gerhard Richter had two sons and a daughter with his third wife, Sabine Moritz, after they were married in 1995.

From 1957 to 1961 Gerhard Richter worked as a master trainee in the academy and took commissions for the then state of East Germany.

Together with his wife Marianne, Gerhard Richter escaped from East to West Germany two months before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Gerhard Richter taught at the Hochschule fur bildende Kunste Hamburg and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a visiting professor; he returned to the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in 1971, where he worked as a professor for over 15 years.

In 1983, Gerhard Richter resettled from Dusseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives and works today.

Gerhard Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on a variety of sources: newspapers and books, sometimes incorporating their captions, ; private snapshots; aerial views of towns and mountains, ; seascapes ; and a large multipart work made for the German Pavilion in the 1972 Venice Biennale.

From around 1964, Gerhard Richter made a number of portraits of dealers, collectors, artists, and others connected with his immediate professional circle.

Lesende portrays Sabine Moritz, whom Gerhard Richter married in 1995, shown absorbed in the pages of a magazine.

From 1966, as well as those given to him by others, Gerhard Richter began using photographs he had taken as the basis for portraits.

Gerhard Richter was most active before 1974, only completing sporadic projects since that time.

Gerhard Richter stopped working in print media in 1974, and began painting from photographs he took himself.

In 1972, Gerhard Richter embarked on a ten-day trip to Greenland.

Gerhard Richter's intention was to experience and record the desolate arctic landscape.

In 1982 and 1983, Gerhard Richter made a series of paintings of Candles and Skulls that relate to a longstanding tradition of still life memento mori painting.

Since 1989, Gerhard Richter has worked on creating new images by dragging wet paint over photographs.

The photographs, not all taken by Gerhard Richter himself, are mostly snapshots of daily life: family vacations, pictures of friends, mountains, buildings, and streetscapes.

Gerhard Richter considers how the ubiquitous photographic documentation of 11 September attacks affects the uniqueness of one's distinct remembrance of the events, and he offers a valuable comparison to Richter's 18 October 1977 cycle.

In 2014, Gerhard Richter created a cycle of four paintings using the Sonderkommando photographs, which were taken in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust, titled Birkenau.

In 1969, Gerhard Richter produced the first of a group of grey monochromes that consist exclusively of the textures resulting from different methods of paint application.

In 1976, Gerhard Richter first gave the title Abstract Painting to one of his works.

Buchloch in 1986, Gerhard Richter was asked about his "Monochrome Grey Pictures and Abstract Pictures" and their connection with the artists Yves Klein and Ellsworth Kelly.

In 2006, Gerhard Richter conceived six paintings as a coherent group under the title Cage, named after the American avant-garde composer John Cage.

The Cage paintings are large works constructed from intersecting fields, lines, and swaths of uneven smears that reflect the broad squeegee tool which Gerhard Richter drags across the canvases, before removing areas of paint to generate a subtractive method of concealing and revealing variegated layers and patches.

In November 2008, Gerhard Richter began a series in which he applied ink droplets to wet paper, using alcohol and lacquer to extend and retard the ink's natural tendency to bloom and creep.

Between 1966 and 1974, Gerhard Richter painted three series of Color Chart works, each growing more ambitious in its attempt to create meaning through the purely arbitrary arrangement of colors.

The charts provided anonymous and impersonal source material, a way for Gerhard Richter to disassociate color from any traditional, descriptive, symbolic or expressive end.

When he began to make these paintings, Gerhard Richter had his friend Blinky Palermo randomly call out colors, which Gerhard Richter then adopted for his work.

Gerhard Richter began to use glass in his work in 1967, when he made Four Panes of Glass.

In 1981, for a two-person show with Georg Baselitz in Dusseldorf, Gerhard Richter produced the first of the monumental transparent mirrors that appear intermittently thereafter in his oeuvre; the mirrors are significantly larger than Gerhard Richter's paintings and feature adjustable steel mounts.

In 2017 Gerhard Richter designed the label of the 2015 Chateau Mouton Rothschild's first wine of that year.

In 2002, the same year as his MoMA retrospective, Gerhard Richter was asked to design a stained glass window in the Cologne Cathedral.

In September 2020, Gerhard Richter unveiled his three 30-foot-tall stained-glass windows for the Tholey Abbey, one of the oldest monasteries in Germany.

Gerhard Richter called them his last major work, adding that he would focus on drawings and sketches from then on.

Gerhard Richter had his first gallery solo show in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Dusseldorf.

Gerhard Richter became known to a US audience in 1990, when the Saint Louis Art Museum circulated Baader-Meinhof, a show that that was later seen at the Lannan Foundation in Marina del Rey, California.

In 2002, a 40-year retrospective of Gerhard Richter's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC His work is included in the permanent collections of several museum institutions in the US, such as the Perez Art Museum Miami.

The Gerhard Richter Archive was established in cooperation with the artist in 2005 as an institute of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

In 2020, Gerhard Richter established the Gerhard Richter Art Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to preserving his work and making it available for exhibitions.

Gerhard Richter was made an honorary citizen of Cologne in April 2007.

Gerhard Richter was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012.

Gerhard Richter is known to have influenced Ellsworth Kelly, Christopher Wool and Johan Andersson.

Gerhard Richter has served as source of inspiration for writers and musicians.

Gerhard Richter was a fan of the band and did not charge for the use of his image.

Since December 2022, Gerhard Richter is represented by David Zwirner Gallery.

In 2011, Belz's feature-length documentary entitled Gerhard Richter Painting was released.

In 2016 and 2019 Gerhard Richter worked again with Corinna Belz on two films based on his 2012 book Patterns.