Gerhard Richter

Born: 1932

Painter

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden into a middle class family. His mother encouraged him to become an artist during his mid-teens, and he embarked on a classical education at the Dresden Art Academy. A few months prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall, he and his wife fled to Düsseldorf in West Germany where he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts.

During the early sixties Richter began to work with artists such as Georg Baselitz. Their work had an impact on the German art scene and eventually influenced international art circles. Together with Polke and Fischer-Lueg, Richter formed a group called the Capitalist Realists.

Richter's first solo exhibition was held at Mobelhaus Berges, Düsseldorf, in 1963. It was the first presentation of his photo-based painting style. Richter blurred the paintings, modernising traditional art through his technique and using photography as his source of material.

Richter's first exhibition in the U.S. took place at the Reinhard Onnasch Gallery in New York in 1973. Fifteen years later he was given his first North American retrospective organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In 2001 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited a retrospective of Richter's paintings called "Forty Years of Painting."

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