German artist, Gerhard Richter, at work with one of his famous squeegees.
Gerhard Richter first rose to prominence in West Germany in the 1960s. In the decades since then, he has become one of the most well-respected figures in the contemporary art world, drawing attention with his unique work which spans many different movements and styles.
Richter fetches consistently high prices at auction, and he’s especially popular in the United States and the United Kingdom. Prints dominate his market, accounting for 54% of his work sold at auction, with most fetching between £1,000 and £5,000, and many fetching far higher prices.
Now a nonagenarian, Richter has led a long and interesting life, and he is still working and exhibiting his art. Read on to discover five things you might not have known about Gerhard Richter.
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He Grew Up In The Third Reich
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, just one year before Adolf Hitler was formally appointed as Germany’s new chancellor. The Richter family were fairly ordinary and middle-class; the artist has described his early life as “simple, orderly, structured – mother playing the piano and father earning money.”
As Hitler and the Nazis grew in power, things changed for the Richter family, and the outbreak of the Second World War led to economic and personal hardship; two of Richter’s uncles were killed in combat, and one of his aunts was starved to death in a psychiatric institution.
Richter is a fairly private man, but he’s spoken quite openly about his childhood in the Third Reich and his subsequent teenage years adapting to communist East Germany. He made it across the border into West Germany in 1961, just a few months before the erection of the Berlin Wall.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For £900,000
Strip (2011) is one of many digital prints Richter has created from Abstraktes Bild (724-4), his abstract painting created in 1990. To make the Strip prints, Richter used computer editing software to digitally replicate the painting, which he proceeded to split into sections and manipulate in such a way that the final results were totally new pieces of work.
The horizontal bands of colour that make up the Strip prints (which Richter often describes as paintings) make the images appear almost like optical illusions. Created at various intervals over the last 15 years or so, the prints’ popularity show how relevant Richter’s work remains to this day; Strip (2011) set a new record for the artist when it was sold by Christie’s in June 2021 for £900,000, and two more prints from the series (made in 2012 and 2015) have also fetched extremely high prices at auction.
Strip sold by Christie’s in 2021
He Is A Colour Theorist
In 1966, Gerhard Richter made his first colour charts, and he continued to experiment with them over the next decade. Describing the first attempts as “unsystematic” and “based directly on commercial colour samples”, Richter proceeded to develop a complex system “based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions”. The system involved multiplying different colour combinations to “obtain a definite number of colour fields that I multiply yet again”. Richter’s colour chart prints are fairly popular at auction, and one set sold for over £266,000 in December 2016.
He Often Paints With A Squeegee
A vast proportion of Gerhard Richter’s best-known abstract paintings were made using a squeegee, with many viewing his Strip prints as an extension of this technique. To the artist, using a squeegee imbues the image with a spontaneity and freedom which can be hard to achieve with a brush; as he said, “I want to end up with a picture that I haven’t planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction… never produces a predetermined picture… I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself.”
Gerhard Richter painting with a large Squeegee
He’s Fascinated By Photography
Gerhard Richter is famous for the massive variety of styles and techniques he has experimented with over the decades, and it’s one of the things that keeps his work fresh and appealing. Equally, he has embraced numerous different mediums, including photography, painting, printmaking, and stained glass.
Photography, indeed, has grown increasingly important to his work after he first started using it in the 1960s. According to Richter, “The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.”
Richter has used photography in many different ways throughout his career, and sometimes this even blurs the boundaries between different types of medium. His Betty prints, for instance, are inspired by a painting of the same name which, in turn, was based on a photograph the artist took of his daughter. To create the subsequent prints, Richter photographed the painting and then turned the image into an offset lithograph; it is hailed as one of his most important pieces of work to date, and it is exemplary of the artist’s innovative nature.
