Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter (1932) is a German painter whose work is recognized as one of the most important of the second half of the 20th century. His paintings, sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, are astonishing both for their uniqueness in the history of painting and for the artist's ability to constantly reinvent himself.

The artist began his practice in the early 1950s at the academy in Dresden. The communist regime in the GDR imposed a social-realist style, to which he also adhered. His first works were thus limited to landscapes and the creation of commissioned political posters. Everything changed in the 1960s, when he moved to Düsseldorf in the Federal Republic of Germany. There, his brush became free and explored new relationships between painting and photography, deducing a new type of abstraction in the 1970s. He then returned to figuration in the 1980s, studying various genres of art history, and reinterpreted them (portraits, landscapes) in an erudite and novel way in the 1980s. 

The turning point of his abstract practice was in 1984, with his watercolour experiments. He incorporates in his work a share of luck: after having applied the color he lets the wet paint flow on the paper.