Gerhard Richter

GERHARD RICHTER (Dresden, 1932).
"Abstrakt, 26.5.92", 2004.
Offset on paper.
Special edition published by Deutsche Bank.
Signed and dated on plate.
Measurements: 31.5 x 41 cm.
Gerhard Richter left school after the tenth grade and undertook his apprenticeship as an advertising and stage painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Art. In 1948 he finished his higher vocational school in Zittau, and, between 1949 and 1951, he was educated there in writing as well as in stage and advertising paintings. In 1950 he tried to enter the University of Visual Arts in Dresden, founded in 1764, but was rejected. He finally returned to his hometown where he began his studies at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1951. His teachers were Karl von Appen, Ulrich Lohmar and Will Grohmann. After finishing his training Richter escaped from East Germany to West Germany, two months before the erection of the Berlin Wall; after the unification of the two German states, the mural he made called Joy of Life (1956) was discovered in two places on the staircase of the German Hygienic Museum.From 1957 to 1961 Richter worked as a master trainer at the academy and took over orders from the former state of the GDR. During this time he worked intensively on murals, oil paintings, and several self-portraits. In 1961 he traveled alone to the Soviet Union, Richter also taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and in 1983, Richter relocated from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives today. Richter held his first solo exhibition, Gerhard Richter, in 1962 in Fulda, burned all the material after the show and at the Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf. Soon after, he held exhibitions in Munich and Berlin and in the early 1970s exhibited in Europe and the United States.After making murals, Richter began a new phase in his career. While at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (1961-64) he discovered abstract expressionism and a number of avant-garde trends, forming friendships with other artists of his generation such as Sigmar Polke. These artists identified themselves as German pop art artists, but were also, for a brief period, initiators of a satirical variant of pop which they called "capitalist realism". In 1962 he began paintings that fused journalistic iconography and family portraits with an austere realism based on photography. In the early 1970s, he evolved into a sober monochromatic painting that evoked the minimalist trend, but with a significant difference in terms of subject matter and feeling. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the brightly colored, boldly delineated paintings on canvas suggested but also differed from the neo-Expressionist pyrotechnic painting then in vogue. Throughout his career, Richter has cultivated a subtly romantic and seemingly anti-modernist style in his work. Gerhard Richter's artistic output can be classified into three categories: figurative, that is, all paintings are based on photography or nature; constructivist, more theoretical work such as color tables, glass panels and mirrors; and abstract, almost all work done since 1976 except still lifes and landscapes.
Gerhard Richter has been awarded several prizes including the Praemium Imperiale in 1997, the Wolf Prize for the Arts in Jerusalem in 1995, the Kokoschka Prize in Paris, the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, the Arnold Bode Preis de Dokumenta and the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale and his work can be seen in different spaces of artistic relevance as the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Reina Sofia, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg among others.