b. 1932 · Dresden, Germany
Painter. Photographer. Sculptor. The artist who dismantled the boundary between figuration and abstraction, between photograph and paint, between memory and blur.
Selected Paintings
Works from public institutional collections
The Artist
Gerhard Richter is widely regarded as one of the most significant artists of the post-war era. Born in Dresden in 1932, he studied under Socialist Realism before defecting to West Germany in 1961 — just weeks before the Berlin Wall rose.
His practice refuses category. Working in parallel across photorealistic blurred paintings, squeegee-dragged abstractions, photo-based works, and large-scale glass installations, Richter questions the very nature of representation.
The deliberate blur — his most recognized signature — is not a stylistic tic but a philosophical position: that paint can never capture truth, only approximate it, and that beauty lives precisely in that gap.
He became the most expensive living painter at auction, yet continued working into his 90s with the same restless uncertainty that has driven his entire career.
Career Chronology
Permanent Holdings
In His Own Words
“I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency. I have no programme, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery.”
“We can describe love but we can't say what it looks like. Painting achieves something close to that.”
“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or crafted, but technological, smooth and perfect.”
“The photograph and the painting are equally real. Neither is an original; neither is a copy. Both are pictures.”
