The Story of: Gerhard Richter (1932–Today)

Summary

Gerhard Richter’s career is presented as a sustained investigation into what painting can do. He moved between photographic realism and abstraction, challenging the distinction between the two rather than settling on a single style.

Early training and departure from East Germany

Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter began drawing regularly as a teenager. He studied stage and billboard painting before attending the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he was trained in socialist realism. He later felt constrained by its rules.

A visit to documenta in Kassel in 1959, where he encountered works by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana, helped convince him that abstraction offered possibilities his training had not. Richter and his first wife, Emma, left East Germany for West Germany, where he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy.

Capitalist Realism and photo paintings

In Düsseldorf, Richter became part of a circle that included Sigmar Polke and Conrad Fischer, then known as Conrad Lueg. They presented “Capitalist Realism,” a tongue-in-cheek response to socialist realism and Western consumer culture.

Richter drew on photographs from family albums, newspapers, and magazines, painting subjects such as military scenes, public figures, and everyday consumer imagery. He used photographs to explore the tension between photographic objectivity and the painter’s interpretation.

His characteristic blurred effect softens detail, making elements seem both equally important and equally insignificant. He was especially drawn to images involving death and suffering, including the ways the media depicts and circulates such events.

Representation and abstraction

From the mid-1960s onward, Richter made portraits, nudes, landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes alongside color charts based on paint-sample cards, grey monochromes, grids, and other abstract experiments. This variety became central to his practice. His later “overpainted photographs” combined photographic imagery with abstract marks.

In the 1970s, Richter reworked representational images until their original subject matter was obscured by brushstrokes and thick impasto. Although these paintings emphasized the physical act of painting, he described the gestures as deliberately impersonal rather than emotional.

Color, perception, and the squeegee

After years of grey paintings, Richter turned toward colorful abstraction. He developed a method of pulling paint across the canvas with a large squeegee, creating layered colors, textures, contrasts, and a sense of depth. His abstract work also explored light, space, optics, and perception.

Later work

Richter continued to work across abstract and figurative modes, making paintings, sculptures involving glass, and works with mirrors. His later projects included the Cage paintings, a stained-glass window for Cologne Cathedral based on his color-chart work, and digital prints of horizontal color bands called Strips.

The video frames Richter’s range not as a departure from painting, but as a continuing inquiry into its possibilities. It also highlights how personal experience, political history, popular culture, photography, and abstraction recur throughout his work.

Artists and creative figures mentioned

• Gerhard Richter
• Jackson Pollock
• Lucio Fontana
• Sigmar Polke
• Blinky Palermo
• Conrad Fischer (Conrad Lueg)
• Joseph Beuys
• Carl Andre
• Sol LeWitt
• Bruce Nauman
• Fred Sandback
• On Kawara
• Richard Long
• Isa Genzken
• John Cage

Emma, Richter’s first wife, is also mentioned as a subject of his paintings.