Gerhard Richter: The Complete Story
One year he paints a family photo so blurred it looks like a fading memory. The next he drags thick paint across a canvas with a giant squeegee until the colour becomes pure abstraction.
Gerhard Richter refuses to settle on a single style, and that refusal has made him, for many, the most important painter alive.
He is a German artist who moves freely between blurred photo paintings and large abstract works, and whose pictures sell for more than those of any other living painter.
What I would read after this
Three that changed how I look at a picture:
The Last Supper, detail by detail, the detail hiding at that table
Six women, one monster, what Picasso did to the women who loved him
The Arnolfini Portrait, detail by detail, the mirror, the dog, and the question everyone asks
The blur
Richter most famous early works are based on photographs, painted in grey and then softly smeared while still wet, so the image looks out of focus.
The blur turns a snapshot into something uncertain and haunting, a meditation on memory and doubt that gave new life to traditional oil painting.
The squeegee
Alongside the photo works he makes huge abstract paintings, dragging a long squeegee through layers of wet colour so the surface tears, mixes and reveals what lies beneath.
Chance does much of the work. These pictures are some of the most admired examples of late abstract art, built by scraping as much as by painting.
Painting German history
Richter grew up under the Nazis and then in communist East Germany before fleeing to the West, and that divided history runs through his art.
His grey cycle on the deaths of a German terrorist group, and his later cycle responding to the Holocaust at Birkenau, show him using the blur to approach horrors that resist being painted directly.
The window of light
In 2007 he designed a vast stained glass window for Cologne Cathedral, made of thousands of small squares of colour arranged partly by chance.
It brought his fascination with randomness and the grid into a medieval church, where it still scatters coloured light across the stone each day.
A few questions about Gerhard Richter
What is he known for?
Blurred photo paintings and large squeegee abstractions.
Why does he change styles?
He distrusts any single fixed style as a kind of false certainty.
Where is he from?
Dresden, Germany, born in 1932.
Is he the priciest living painter?
His abstracts have set records for a living artist at auction.
Why his doubt feels honest
Richter built a whole career on never trusting a single answer, and in an age of doubt that has made him feel truthful where others feel like brands.
One of his abstract paintings sold in London for around forty six million dollars, a record for a living artist at the time, paid for a picture made largely by dragging a blade through paint.
He once produced a vast printed catalogue assigning a number to every work he accepted, quietly disowning the rest, an archivist control over his own legacy that few artists attempt.
He has also refused to let his most personal painting, the Birkenau cycle, leave Germany, and donated key works to the nation so they could never be sold off, treating his hardest pictures as a public trust rather than private property.
His range is so wide that a viewer can stand between a tender grey portrait and a torn field of colour and struggle to believe one hand made both, which is exactly the unease he wants.
He has worked steadily into his nineties, and his decision to stop painting and turn to small drawings was treated as news in itself across the art world.