\n\n N\/A\n <\/td>\n | \n N\/A\n <\/td>\n | \n N\/A\n <\/td>\n | \n N\/A\n <\/td>\n | \n N\/A\n <\/td>\n | \n N\/A\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\nBefore Fame<\/h2>\nHe attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, Germany. He apprenticed with a sign painter, a photographer, and a painter from 1949 until 1951.<\/p>\n <\/i> Biography<\/h2>\n<\/i> Biography Timeline<\/h2>\n\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1936<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n After struggling to maintain a position in the new Nationalist Socialist education system, Horst found a position in Reichenau. Gerhard’s younger sister, Gisela, was born there in 1936. Horst and Hildegard were able to remain primarily apolitical due to Reichenau’s location in the countryside. Horst, being a teacher, was eventually forced to join the National Socialist Party. He never became an avid supporter of Nazism, and was not required to attend party rallies. In 1942, Gerhard was conscripted into the Deutsches Jungvolk, but by the end of the war he was still too young to be an official member of the Hitler Youth. In 1943, Hildegard moved the family to Waltersdorf, and was later forced to sell her piano. Two brothers of Hildegard died as soldiers in the war and a sister, who was schizophrenic, was starved to death in the Nazi euthanasia program.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1948<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n Richter left school after 10th grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1948, he finished vocational high school in Zittau, and, between 1949 and 1951, successively worked as an apprentice with a sign painter and as a painter. In 1950, his application for study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts was rejected as “too bourgeois”. He finally began his studies at the Academy in 1951. His teachers there were Karl von Appen, Heinz Lohmar [de] and Will Grohmann.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1957<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957; she gave birth to his first daughter. He married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982. Richter had two sons and a daughter with his third wife, Sabine Moritz after they were married in 1995.<\/p>\n From 1957 to 1961 Richter worked as a master trainee in the academy and took commissions for the then state of East Germany. During this time, he worked intensively on murals like Arbeiterkampf (Workers’ struggle), on oil paintings (e.g. portraits of the East German actress Angelica Domr\u00f6se and of Richter’s first wife Ema), on various self-portraits and on a panorama of Dresden with the neutral name Stadtbild (Townscape, 1956).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1961<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n Together with his wife Marianne, Richter escaped from East to West Germany two months before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Both his wall paintings in the Academy of Arts and the Hygiene Museum were then painted over for ideological reasons. Much later, after German reunification, two “windows” of the wall painting Joy of life (1956) would be uncovered in the stairway of the German Hygiene Museum, but these were later covered over when it was decided to restore the Museum to its original 1930 state.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1963<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n While elements of landscape painting appeared initially in Richter’s work early on in his career in 1963, the artist began his independent series of landscapes in 1968 after his first vacation, an excursion that landed him besotted with the terrain of Corsica. Landscapes have since emerged as an independent work group in his oeuvre. According to Dietmar Elger, Richter’s landscapes are understood within the context of traditional of German Romantic Painting. They are compared to the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774\u20131840). Friedrich is foundational to German landscape painting. Each artist spent formative years of their lives in Dresden. Gro\u00dfe Teyde-Landschaft (1971) takes its imagery from similar holiday snapshots of the volcanic regions of Tenerife.<\/p>\n Richter first began exhibiting in D\u00fcsseldorf in 1963. Richter had his first gallery solo show in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in D\u00fcsseldorf. Soon after, he had exhibitions in Munich and Berlin and by the early 1970s exhibited frequently throughout Europe and the United States. In 1966, Bruno Bischofberger was the first to show Richter’s works outside Germany. Richter’s first retrospective took place at the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1976 and covered works from 1962 to 1974. A traveling retrospective at D\u00fcsseldorf’s Kunsthalle in 1986 was followed in 1991 by a retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London. In 1993, he received a major touring retrospective “Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962\u20131993” curated by Kasper K\u00f6nig, with a three volume catalogue edited by Benjamin Buchloh. This exhibition containing 130 works carried out over the course of thirty years, was to entirely reinvent Richter’s career.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1964<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n From around 1964, Richter made a number of portraits of dealers, collectors, artists and others connected with his immediate professional circle. Richter’s two portraits of Betty, his daughter, were made in 1977 and 1988 respectively; the three portraits titled IG were made in 1993 and depict the artist’s second wife, Isa Genzken. Lesende (1994) portrays Sabine Moritz, whom Richter married in 1995, shown absorbed in the pages of a magazine. Many of his realist paintings reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims of, the Nazi party. From 1966, as well as those given to him by others, Richter began using photographs he had taken as the basis for portraits. In 1975, on the occasion of a show in D\u00fcsseldorf, Gilbert & George commissioned Richter to make a portrait of them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1965<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n Richter began making prints in 1965. He was most active before 1974, only completing sporadic projects since that time. In the period 1965\u20131974, Richter made most of his prints (more than 100), of the same or similar subjects in his paintings. He has explored a variety of photographic printmaking processes \u2013 screenprint, photolithography, and collotype \u2013 in search of inexpensive mediums that would lend a “non-art” appearance to his work. He stopped working in print media in 1974, and began painting from photographs he took himself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1966<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n As early as 1966, Richter had made paintings based on colour charts, using the rectangles of colour as found objects in an apparently limitless variety of hue; these culminated in 1973\u20134 in a series of large-format pictures such as 256 Colours. Richter painted three series of Color Chart paintings between 1966 and 1974, each series growing more ambitious in their attempt to create through their purely arbitrary arrangement of colors. The artist began his investigations into the complex permutations of color charts in 1966, with a small painting entitled 10 Colors. The charts provided anonymous and impersonal source material, a way for Richter to disassociate color from any traditional, descriptive, symbolic or expressive end. When he began to make these paintings, Richter had his friend Blinky Palermo randomly call out colors, which Richter then adopted for his work. Chance thus plays its role in the creation of his first series.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1967<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n Richter began to use glass in his work in 1967, when he made Four Panes of Glass. These plain sheets of glass could tilt away from the poles on which they were mounted at an angle that changed from one installation to the next. In 1970, he and Blinky Palermo jointly submitted designs for the sports facilities for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. For the front of the arena, they proposed an array of glass windows in twenty-seven different colors; each color would appear fifty times, with the distribution determined randomly. In 1981, for a two-person show with Georg Baselitz in D\u00fcsseldorf, Richter produced the first of the monumental transparent mirrors that appear intermittently thereafter in his oeuvre; the mirrors are significantly larger than Richter’s paintings and feature adjustable steel mounts. For pieces such as Mirror Painting (Grey, 735-2) (1991), the mirrors were coloured grey by the pigment attached to the back of the glass. Arranged in two rooms, Richter presented an ensemble of paintings and colored mirrors in a special pavilion designed in collaboration with architect Paul Robbrecht at Documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1969<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n Coming full-circle from his early Table (1962) in which he cancelled his photorealist image with haptic swirls of grey paint, in 1969, Richter produced the first of a group of grey monochromes that consist exclusively of the textures resulting from different methods of paint application.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1971<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n Richter taught at the Hochschule f\u00fcr bildende K\u00fcnste Hamburg and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a visiting professor; he returned to the Kunstakademie D\u00fcsseldorf in 1971, where he worked as a professor for over 15 years.<\/p>\n Returning to color charts in the 1970s, Richter changed his focus from the readymade to the conceptual system, developing mathematical procedures for mixing colours and chance operations for their placement. The range of the colors he employed was determined by a mathematical system for mixing the primary colors in graduated amounts. Each color was then randomly ordered to create the resultant composition and form of the painting. Richter’s second series of Color Charts was begun in 1971 and consisted of only five paintings. In the final series of Color Charts which preoccupied Richter throughout 1973 and 1974, additional elements to this permutational system of color production were added in the form of mixes of a light grey, a dark gray and later, a green.<\/p>\n Following an exhibition with Blinky Palermo at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in 1971, Richter’s formal arrangement with the dealer came to an end in 1972. Thereafter Friedrich was only entitled to sell the paintings that he had already obtained contractually from Richter. In the following years, Richter showed with Galerie Konrad Fischer, D\u00fcsseldorf, and Sperone Westwater, New York. Today Richter is represented by Marian Goodman, his primary dealer since 1985.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1972<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n 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, (as in Helga Matura (1966)); private snapshots; aerial views of towns and mountains, (Cityscape Madrid (1968) and Alps (1968)); seascapes (1969\u201370); and a large multipart work made for the German Pavilion in the 1972 Venice Biennale. For Forty-eight Portraits (1971\u201372), he chose mainly the faces of composers such as Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, and of writers such as H. G. Wells and Franz Kafka.<\/p>\n Atlas was first exhibited in 1972 at the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title Atlas der Fotos und Skizzen, it included 315 parts. The work has continued to expand, and was exhibited later in full form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1989, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1990, and at Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1995. Atlas continues as an ongoing, encyclopedic work composed of approximately 4,000 photographs, reproductions or cut-out details of photographs and illustrations, grouped together on approximately 600 separate panels.<\/p>\n In 1972, Richter embarked on a ten-day trip to Greenland, his friend Hanne Darboven was meant to accompany him, but instead he traveled alone. His intention was to experience and record the desolate arctic landscape. In 1976, four large paintings, each titled Seascape emerged from the Greenland photographs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1976<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n In 1976, Richter first gave the title Abstract Painting to one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few words to name and explain it, he felt he was “letting a thing come, rather than creating it.” In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of non-representational painting, beginning with brushing big swaths of primary color onto canvas. The paintings evolve in stages, based on his responses to the picture’s progress: the incidental details and patterns that emerge. Throughout his process, Richter uses the same techniques he uses in his representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1980<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n Throughout his career, Richter has mostly declined lucrative licensing deals and private commissions. Measuring 9 by 9 \u00bd feet and depicting both the Milan Duomo and the square’s 19th-century Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Domplatz, Mailand [Cathedral Square, Milan] (1968) was a commission from Siemens, and it hung in that company’s offices in Milan from 1968 to 1998. (In 1998, Sotheby’s sold it in London, where it fetched what was then a record price for Richter, $3.6 million). In 1980, Richter and Isa Genzken were commissioned to design the K\u00f6nig-Heinrich-Platz underground station in Duisburg; it was only completed in 1992. In 1986, Richter received a commission for two large-scale paintings \u2013 Victoria I and Victoria II \u2013 from the Victoria insurance company in D\u00fcsseldorf. In 1990, along with Sol LeWitt and Oswald Mathias Ungers, he created works for the Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechselbank in D\u00fcsseldorf. In 1998, he installed a wall piece based on the colours of Germany’s flag in the rebuilt Reichstag in Berlin. In 2012 he was asked to design the first page of the German newspaper Die Welt. In 2017 Richter designed the label of the 2015 Chateau Mouton Rothschild’s first wine of that year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1982<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n In 1982 and 1983, Richter made a series of paintings of Candles and Skulls that relate to a longstanding tradition of still life memento mori painting. Each composition is most commonly based on a photograph taken by Richter in his own studio. Influenced by old master vanitas painters such as Georges de La Tour and Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, the artist began to experiment with arrangements of candles and skulls placed in varying degrees of natural light, sitting atop otherwise barren tables. The Candle paintings coincided with his first large-scale abstract paintings, and represent the complete antithesis to those vast, colorful and playfully meaningless works. Richter has made only 27 of these still lifes. In 1995, the artist marked the 50th anniversary of the allied bombings of his hometown Dresden during the Second World War. His solitary candle was reproduced on a monumental scale and placed overlooking the River Elbe as a symbol of rejuvenation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1983<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n In 1983, Richter resettled from D\u00fcsseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives and works today. In 1996, he moved into a studio designed by architect Thiess Marwede. With an estimated fortune of \u20ac700 million, Richter was ranked number 220 of the richest 1,001 individuals and families in Germany by the monthly business publication Manager Magazin in 2017.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1986<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n From the mid-1980s, Richter began to use a homemade squeegee to rub and scrape the paint that he had applied in large bands across his canvases. In an interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloch in 1986, Richter was asked about his “Monochrome Grey Pictures and Abstract Pictures” and their connection with the artists Yves Klein and Ellsworth Kelly. The following are Richter’s answers:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n 1988<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n In a 1988 series of 15 ambiguous photo paintings entitled 18 October 1977, he depicted four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German left-wing militant organization. These paintings were created from black-and-white newspaper and police photos. Three RAF members were found dead in their prison cells on 18 October 1977 and the cause of their deaths was the focus of widespread controversy. In the late 1980s, Richter had begun to collect images of the group which he used as the basis for the 15 paintings exhibited for the first time in Krefeld in 1989. The paintings were based on an official portrait of Ulrike Meinhof during her years as a radical journalist; on photographs of the arrest of Holger Meins; on police shots of Gudrun Ensslin in prison; on Andreas Baader’s bookshelves and the record player to conceal his gun; on the dead figures of Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader; and on the funeral of Ensslin, Baader, and Jan-Carl Raspe.<\/p>\n He has also served as source of inspiration for writers and musicians. Sonic Youth used a painting of his for the cover art for their album Daydream Nation in 1988. He was a fan of the band and did not charge for the use of his image. The original, over 7 metres (23 ft) square, is now showcased in Sonic Youth’s studio in NYC. Don DeLillo’s short story “Baader-Meinhof” describes an encounter between two strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The meeting takes place in the room displaying 18 October 1977 (1988).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n |