He is considered the most influential, the most famous of the living artists. The total value of works sold at auctions exceeded half a billion dollars. The price record for one thing was set in February 2015 by an abstract composition, for which about $ 44.5 million was paid.
Gerhard Richter, being at a respectable age, loves solitude and actively continues to work in his studio near Cologne. Each new exhibition of his works surprises with the novelty of creative searches and becomes the brightest event in the artistic life of Europe and the world.
Germany, East Germany, Germany
He was born in 1932 in Dresden. Father - Horst Richter - was a school teacher, but his mother, Hildegard, had a greater influence on Gerhard's spiritual development. She supported her son's early interest in art.
In 1951, Gerhard Richter entered the Hochschule für Bildende Künste - the Higher School of Fine Arts in Dresden, where he received a solid academic education. The artistic life of East Germany, where Gerhard was at the place of birth, became more and more ideological. The period of the young artist’s initial training in the profession took place in a situation where socialist realism became the main artistic style, and in the conditions of struggle with formalism and abstractionism, it was completely unique.
In 1958, Richter visited the city of Kassel (territory of West Germany) at an exhibition of contemporary art called the “Documenta”. It was aimed at overcoming the Nazi heritage in art - vanguardism was also persecuted in the days of fascism. Pictures of artists who embody the most avant-garde ideas - Jason Pollock, Jean Fotrier, Lucio Fontana and others - made a revolution in the thinking of Richter. The desire to gain creative freedom led him to a decision to emigrate, although he always referred to himself as non-political artists. In 1961, Gerhard Richter became a political refugee and ended up in Germany.
Experiment time
In 1961, Richter, although he completed his studies at the Dresden Higher School, again became a student. He enters the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts. The scholarship that he receives there has become a significant help in the life of an emigrant. His life in this period is the search for his own path in art and the time of constant experiments. He tries his strength in almost all areas of modern painting - from abstract expressionism to pop art.
Gerhard finds among his classmates like-minded people, including Sigmar Polke, Conrad Fischer. In 1963, a joint exhibition was opened in one of the empty shops in the center of Düsseldorf, in which pop art compositions were complemented by performance with the participation of living sculptures, film projection, etc. Richter and his friends called ironic realism not without irony.
Gerhard Richter considered most of his works of that time to be of little value and destroyed. But it was then that his first paintings appeared, created on the basis of black and white photographs, in which a realistic image undergoes a characteristic blur, which has become a visiting card master.
Since 1964, after graduating from the Academy, an independent path of the artist begins.
Path to recognition
In 1967, Richter was awarded the Kunstpreis junger westen, an award that marks the most talented young artists in Germany, and in 1971, a whole pavilion at the famous Venice Biennale is allocated to his works . In 1973, the first solo exhibition of the artist in the United States.
Since then, his paintings appear in the most prestigious public and private collections. In addition to the purely artistic merits of his works, experts and viewers note the scale of the creator's searches and experiments. Richter's ideas inspire artists around the world and become the basis for new trends in contemporary painting.
Classification difficulties
“There is no program in my art, there is no single style, there is no general direction,” he likes to repeat Gerhard Richter. His paintings are diverse in genres and themes. In addition to the works created at the intersection of painting and photography, the master creates non-pointy multi-layer colorful compositions born with the help of scrapers, brushes and a doctor blade - a wide spatula that distributes colorful mixtures over a large plane.
His monochrome (gray) minimalist canvases and objectless and figurative, hyper-realistic portraits and landscapes are known, as well as amazing still lifes in the style of photo painting - such are the “Candles” created in the early 1980s, and much more. He participated in the restoration of the famous stained glass windows in the cathedral of Cologne. At the most recent exhibitions there is also a sculpture - volumetric compositions from glass paintings located at different angles.
Richter in the 21st Century
In total, about three thousand paintings by the artist are known. Despite the stroke suffered by Richter, about two hundred of his new paintings appear annually.
He is embarrassed and confused by the prices at which his works are acquired at auctions. He shows doubts about their justification, saying that today the very essence of artistic creation is changing. Moreover, the share of skepticism in his assessment of the role of pure art in modern life is growing. Despite this, he is full of energy and desire to work and create.