Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter was born on 9 February 1932 in Dresden, Germany, and received his initial training in mural painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts between 1951 and 1956. Following his defection to West Germany in 1961, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, studying under Karl Otto Götz. He subsequently joined the faculty there, teaching painting from 1971 to 1993, and has lived and worked primarily in Cologne since the 1980s. Since December 2022, his primary representation has been held exclusively by David Zwirner across its New York, London, and Paris galleries.

Richter's practice is defined by a sustained, restless interrogation of what painting can and cannot do — particularly in relation to photography, memory, and historical representation. His early photo-paintings established the terms of this inquiry: Uncle Rudi (Onkel Rudi) (1965) renders his uncle in Wehrmacht uniform as a blurred, unsettling image drawn from a family photograph, confronting personal and national history simultaneously. Familie im Schnee (1966) applies the same grey-toned, photographic logic to an ordinary domestic scene, questioning the reliability of both memory and the photographic image. That same year, Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) — now held at Museum Ludwig, Cologne — placed his practice in dialogue with art history by responding to Duchamp while insisting on painting's continued vitality. The Grey paintings and Colour Charts of the late 1960s and 1970s pushed further, treating non-color and systematized hue as conceptual propositions rather than expressive choices. His Atlas, begun in the 1960s and continuously expanded, assembles the photographic and visual material underlying his paintings into a monumental archive that scholars regard as a major conceptual work in its own right.

Richter's mature output encompasses several distinct but interconnected bodies of work. The Abstraktes Bild series, developed from the late 1970s onward using squeegee and layered scraping techniques, is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, and Centre Pompidou, and has become central to his international standing as a painter of abstraction. The cycle 18. Oktober 1977 (1988), fifteen blurred paintings depicting members of the Red Army Faction now held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is widely regarded as one of the most significant history paintings of the late twentieth century. Betty (1988), with a version at the Saint Louis Art Museum, withholds its subject's face in a gesture that encapsulates Richter's simultaneous use and subversion of photographic realism. His Birkenau cycle of 2014 — four large abstract paintings derived from suppressed photographs taken at Auschwitz — represents his most direct engagement with the limits of representing atrocity. Beyond canvas, his stained-glass window for the south transept of Cologne Cathedral, completed in 2007, integrates his abstract color vocabulary into one of Europe's great Gothic monuments.

Richter received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1997. His work is held by institutions including the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Fondation Beyeler. Recent exhibitions include Gerhard Richter: Painting After All at The Met Breuer in 2020, 100 Works for Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2023, and a major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton opening in October 2025 — co-organised with Nicholas Serota and reviewed extensively in the international press. A solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York, Gerhard Richter: Landschaften, followed in 2026. His paintings are documented in a multi-volume catalogue raisonné covering his numbered oeuvre in systematic form.