Gerhard Richter, one of the world’s most famous living artists.
Gerhard Richter is an innovative German artist who has embraced and absorbed many artistic movements whilst staunchly refusing to be defined by any of them. Throughout a long career, Richter has become one of the world’s most successful living artists, with some hailing him as the most famous painter alive today.
Richter’s work remains steadily popular at auction, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States. Though his primary medium is undoubtedly painting, he has also produced numerous prints. Indeed, prints account for 54% of his work sold at auction, where most reach prices between £1,000 and £5,000.
Below is a list of Gerhard Richter’s six most expensive prints sold at auction. If you own a Gerhard Richter print and want to know more about how much it could be worth, or how to sell it, contact Mark Littler today.
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Strip (2011)
Gerhard Richter’s Strip images are all based upon one 1990 abstract painting titled Abstraktes Bild (724-4). Always keen to embrace new techniques and ideas, Richter employed computer editing software to create a digital replica of Abstraktes Bild, which he then split into sections. He proceeded to stretch and splice those sections until they became something completely new and totally unrecognisable.
The resulting horizontal bands of colour border on being optical illusions, and they are testaments to Richter’s compulsion to explore new possibilities and ways of working. The artist often refers to the Strip images as paintings, even though they are technically digital prints. They’re extremely popular at auction, with the unique work, Strip (2011), setting a new record for the artist when it was sold by Christie’s in June 2021 for £900,000.
Strip (2001) Sold by Christie’s in 2021
Strip (2015)
This is another of Richter’s Strip artworks, and it was sold by Sotheby’s in November 2023 for £805,050. This time, the piece is in four parts, which together measure an impressive 200 centimetres by 1.1 metres. Richter’s Strip series is often viewed as the natural extension of his famous squeegee technique, in which the artist builds up thin layers of paint using large squeegees.
For Richter, this technique allows him to “end up with a picture that I hadn’t planned”; the artist says, “With a brush you have control. The paint goes on the brush and you make the mark. From experience, you know exactly what will happen. With the squeegee you lose control.”
Cage Grid (Complete Set)
This giclée print in 16 parts dates from 2011 but is based on the artist’s 2006 painting, Cage (6) from his Cage series, which was first exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The paintings and subsequent prints are celebrations of the influential avant-garde American composer, John Cage, who pioneered the use of indeterminacy and non-musical instruments.
In his Cage Grid series, Richter deconstructed his earlier painting into 16 separate squares, each of which invites closer examination and further dissection. The complete set was sold by Sotheby’s in November 2015 for £791,160, more than £260,000 above its top estimate.
Cage Grid (Complete Set) sold by Sotheby’s in 2015
Strip (2012)
Proving once more how popular his Strip series is, this 2012 print was sold by Christie’s in October 2021 for £750,000. Unlike the dense mass of overlapping, crisscrossing colours of Abstraktes Bild, Richter’s digital manipulation of the painting resulted in a series of images which have a rigid, controlled element to them, whilst remaining true to the abstract heart of the original painting.
Strip (2012) sold by Christie’s in 2021
Konzeptblatt zu Farbfelder / Anordnungen Von 1260 Farben
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Gerhard Richter began to explore and make contributions to colour theory. Mostly, this expressed itself through his colour charts, with small squares or rectangles of colour (sometimes thousands of them) butting up against each other.
According to Richter, “the first colour charts were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples.” Over time, however, the artist developed a sophisticated system to create his colour charts, which he explained thus: “Based on mixtures of the three primary colours, along with black and white, I come up with a certain number of possible colours and, by multiplying these by two or four, I obtain a definite number of colour fields that I multiply yet again by two, etc. But the complete realisation of this project demands a great deal of time and work.”
This set of offset prints was accompanied by the artist’s concept sheet, thus giving an insight into his working practice. The prints were sold by Grisebach in December 2016 for £266,795, nearly £140,000 over their top estimate.
Konzeptblatt zu Farbfelder / Anordnungen Von 1260 Farben sold by Grisebach in 2016
Betty
Richter first started incorporating photographs into his practice in the early 1960s. He’s fascinated by the medium and its relationship to painting, once claiming: “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.”
And indeed, photography plays a central role in this 1991 offset lithograph; it was based on Richter’s 1989 painting of the same name, which in turn was based on a photograph the artist took of Betty, his 11 year old daughter. Richter then photographed his painting and turned the image into an offset lithograph, thereby blurring the boundaries between different mediums.
The pose of the sitter and the colours found in the work are exceptionally striking, and it’s generally considered among the best pieces Richter has created. The lithographs were only produced as a limited edition of 25, and one of those exceeded its top estimate by £110,000 when it was sold by Christie’s in July 2014 for £260,000.
Betty sold by Christie’s in 2014
