KunstenaarDEgeb.1932
Gerhard Richter
0 actieve items
In 1961, weeks before the Berlin Wall went up, Gerhard Richter carried rolls of canvas from East to West Germany. He had been a successful Social Realist painter in Dresden - trained at the Kunstakademie there from 1952 to 1956 - but the move to the West and enrollment at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf changed everything. Studying alongside Sigmar Polke and encountering American Pop Art for the first time, Richter began to repaint ordinary photographs in blurred, grey tones: a kind of anti-painting that questioned what images could truthfully convey.
That interrogation never stopped. Over six decades Richter has moved between photorealist works based on press photographs and family snapshots, large-scale abstract canvases built up and scraped back with a homemade squeegee, grey monochromes, glass panels and colour-chart paintings. The breadth is not inconsistency but a systematic testing of what painting can and cannot do against the dominance of photographic imagery. His series "October 18, 1977" (1988), fifteen paintings derived from news photographs of the Baader-Meinhof group's deaths, stands as one of the most discussed political works in postwar European art.
From the mid-1980s the squeegee became his signature tool for abstract work. Applied to paint laid in broad horizontal bands, the implement drags, smears and partially removes colour in ways that resist intentional composition. The results - often large, luminous and physically seductive - carry the paradox of images that look both made and found. His 2014 cycle "Birkenau", based on clandestine photographs taken inside Auschwitz-Birkenau, returned this mechanical erasure to historical memory with particular gravity.
Public commissions have marked his presence beyond gallery walls. The stained glass window he designed for Cologne Cathedral, inaugurated in 2007, arranges 11,263 glass squares in 72 colours across 106 square metres in a pixelated random field. It generated significant controversy - the Cardinal objected to its abstract, non-figurative character - but the work endures as one of the most discussed pieces of public art in modern Germany. Richter has held major retrospectives at the Tate Modern (2011), the Centre Pompidou (2012) and the MoMA (1988, 2002). He was awarded the Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association the same year.
On the Nordic auction market, Richter appears predominantly through prints and multiples rather than paintings. In the Auctionist database, 34 items are attributed to him, handled mainly by Phillips (17 lots) and Van Ham (10 lots), followed by Grisebach and Ketterer Kunst. The top recorded result is 199,950 GBP for "Abstraktes Bild (431-8)", with prints such as "Orchidee II", "Onkel Rudi" and "Kreuz" achieving 18,000-28,000 GBP. His prints - part of a carefully controlled edition programme documented in the Butin catalogue raisonné - remain the most accessible entry point for collectors in the Nordic market, where original paintings appear only rarely and at a very different price level.