Gerhard Richter (German, 1932 - )
“Art is the highest form of hope” ~ Gerhard Richter Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden on 9th February 1932, the first child of Horst and Hildegard Richter. A daughter, Gisela, followed four years later. They were in many respects an average middle-class family: Horst worked as a teacher at a secondary school in Dresden and Hildegard was a bookseller who liked to play the piano.1 In an interview with Robert Storr, Richter described his early family life as "simple, orderly, structured – mother playing the piano and father earning money."2 In 1935, Horst accepted a teaching position at a school in Reichenau, a town which today is known as Bogatynia in Poland, at the time located in the German province Saxony. Settling in Reichenau was a drastic change for the family, which was accustomed to the vivid cultural life of the larger Dresden.3 Yet, it was also a move which would keep the family largely safe from the coming war. In the late 1930s Horst was conscripted into the German army, captured by Allied forces and detained as a prisoner of war until Germany's defeat. In 1946, he was released and returned to his family, who had again relocated, this time to Waltersdorf, a village on the Czech border. The post-war years caused difficulties for the Richter family, as for many others. Horst’s return was not that of a war-hero. Commenting on this period in later life, Richter reflected: "[Horst] shared most father's fate at the time [...] nobody wanted them."4 In an interview from 2004, he added: "[we] were so alienated that we didn't know how to deal with each other."5 Horst’s former membership of the National Socialist Party, which all teachers had been obliged to join under the Nazi regime, made it difficult for him to return to teaching. He eventually ended up working in a textile mill in nearby in Zittau, before finding a post as an administrator of a distance learning programme for an educational institution in Dresden.6 Richter has remarked on his early years with a mixture of fondness and frustration, sadness and excitement. He reminisced about the house in which he was born, on Grossenhainer Strasse in Dresden: "[it] was not far from the original Circus Sarrasani building, where – as a young boy – I could see the elephant stalls through the cellar windows. I remember my great-grandmother's sewing box, made of armadillo skin, and a man falling from a ladder – something that, according to my parents, only I had seen."7 Not much is documented about Richter's time in Reichenau, but he has talked about his experiences of Waltersdorf: "we had moved to a new village, and automatically I was an outsider. I couldn't speak the dialect and so on."8 In 1942, because he turned 10 years old, Richter was required to join the ‘Pimpfen’, a mandatory organisation for children that prepared them for the Hitler Youth. Later, Richter attended grammar school in Zittau but eventually dropped out. He has been described as "a highly gifted child but notoriously bad in school,"9 with Dietmar Elger noting that "he even got poor grades in drawing."10 He ended up attending a vocational school instead, studying stenography, bookkeeping, and Russian. While too young to be drafted into the German army during the Second World War, the war nonetheless had a deep impact on Richter. The family experienced economic hardship and personal loss: Hildegard's brothers, Rudi and Alfred, and sister, Marianne, all died as a consequence of the war. "It was sad when my mother's brothers fell in battle. First the one, then the other. I'll never forget how the women screamed,"11 Richter recalls. Marianne, who suffered from mental health problems, was starved to death in a psychiatric clinic.12 Even though Waltersdorf was spared the extensive bombing that nearby Dresden was exposed to, it was not sheltered. Speaking to Jan-Thorn Prikker, Richter has said: "the retreating German soldiers, the convoys, the low-flying Russian planes shooting at refugees, the trenches, the weapons lying around everywhere, artillery, broken down cars. Then the invasion of the Russians [...] ransacking, rapes, a huge camp where us kids sometimes got barley soup."13 As a child, the military had fascinated Richter: "When the soldiers came through the village, I went up to them and wanted to join them."14 He explained to Storr: "when you're twelve years old you're too little to understand all that ideological hocus- pocus."15 Richter remembers playing in the woods and trenches with his friends, shooting with forgotten rifles which they found lying around: "I thought it was great. [...] I was fascinated, like all kids."16 The bombings of Dresden made an enduring impression on Richter: "in the night, everyone came out onto the street of our village 100 kilometres away. Dresden was being bombed, "now, at this moment!"17 Following the Potsdam agreement at the end of the war, the area in which Richter lived fell under Soviet control. The Second World War profoundly changed the face of the country that Richter had been born into, which had a lasting effect on Richter's education and later artistic practice. Richter's interest in art and culture began to take shape in the aftermath of the Second World War. He receives a simple plate camera as a Christmas gift from his mother. Werner Jungmichel, a camera shop owner in Waltersdorf teaches the young Richter how to develop photographs, a skill that will prove useful throughout his career. As the eastern part of Germany became the GDR (German Democratic Republic), political uncertainty was accompanied by a shifting cultural status quo: "It was very nasty, [but] when the Russians came to our village and expropriated the houses of the rich who had already left or were driven out, they made libraries for the people out of these houses. And that was fantastic."14 Richter has recalled suddenly being able to access books that had been forbidden under Nazi rule: "Cesare Lombroso's Genius and Madness, Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Feuchtwanger, all that middle-class literature. It was a wonderful, care-free time ... made it easy to forget the dark side of things.”15 Richter's mother encouraged her son's interest in literature, and, as Dietmar Elger has noted, it was this "endless supply of illustrated books that prompted his own first drawings."16 In an interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, Richter described how he learnt about art "from books and from the little folios with art prints that you used to get then – I remember Diego Velázquez, Albrecht Dürer, Lovis Corinth [...] It was simply a matter of what was around, what we saw and bought for ourselves."17 Around the age of 15, Richter started to draw regularly. One of his early sketches, from 1946, was a nude figure copied from a book, which his parents reacted to with both pride and embarrassment. He also created landscapes and self-portraits, working mainly with watercolours. In a 2002 interview with Robert Storr, Richter describes a watercolour showing a group of people dancing, drawn in Waltersdorf: "I was at a club, watching the others dance, and I was jealous and bitter and annoyed. So in the watercolour, all this anger is included, at 16. It was the same with the poems I was writing – very romantic, but bitter and nihilistic, like Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse."18 In 1947, while still studying in Zittau, Richter started taking evening classes in painting. Little has been documented about these first painting lessons, although Elger notes that before completing the course, Richter felt he gained enough skill to match his instructors. Yet, on completing his bookkeeping studies in 1948, Richter was still not considering becoming a professional artist. Instead, Richter left Waltersdorf for Zittau to become an apprentice, a common route into a career during the 1940s. He mulled over an array of professions, including forestry, dentistry and lithography, eventually finding employment with a company that produced banners for the GDR government. Here, his main task was cleaning old banners and readying them for being painted again. Storr recounts that during his five months in this post, Richter never had the opportunity to actually paint any of the banners himself. In February 1950, he was taken on as an assistant set painter for the municipal theatre in Zittau. During his few months there, he worked on productions for Goethe's Faust and Schiller's William Tell. His career in the theatre ended abruptly however, when Richter refused to do a wall painting on the theatre's staircases and was promptly dismissed. Soon after leaving the theatre, Richter applied to study painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden [Dresden Art Academy]. It is unclear whether he had been planning to do so, or whether his dismissal prompted him to consider a fresh start. But it was clearly a decision to which he remained committed, even after his first application was rejected. The examiners advised him to find a job with a state-run organisation, as state employees were given preferential treatment in applications at the time. During the following eight months Richter worked as a painter at the Dewag textile plant in Zittau. In the summer of 1951, he returned to his birth city Dresden, ready to begin his formal art studies. In 1961, Richter and his wife Ema defected to West Germany from the increasingly repressive GDR. They stayed with a friend, Reinhard Graner, in Düsseldorf for the first few weeks. Initially Richter considered moving to Munich, but following advice from Graner chose to settle in Düsseldorf. The city’s Staatliche Kunstakademie [Düsseldorf Art Academy] had a considerable reputation and featured largely in Richter’s final decision. Despite having already studied art at the Dresden Academy, Richter decided to apply, seeking the opportunity to integrate with his new environment, meet peers and broaden his knowledge of contemporary art. As a student he would also receive a stipend, which would help him during the first few years in the West. Richter started studying at the Düsseldorf Academy in October 1961, in Ferdinand Macketanz's class. An intensely productive period followed: "I tried out everything I could."38 He later described his work at the time as "varying in style between Dubuffet, Giacometti, Tàpies, and many others."39 While Richter was unhappy with and destroyed many of these paintings, it was an important period of experimentation that helped to establish him in the Academy. In the 1960s, the Academy was at the forefront of developments in the art world. In addition to being a bastion of Informel painting, it became a hub for the Fluxus movement when Joseph Beuys was appointed professor. Düsseldorf and nearby Cologne offered a vibrant community of artists, exhibitions and events - energised not least by the ZERO group, founded by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack in 1957. Richter had arrived in the midst of all this, and many aspects of this environment would remain sources of long-lasting inspiration. After his first term, Richter moved into the class of Karl Otto Götz, who had been attracting some of the most interesting students at the Academy. Amongst these Richter would find a circle of friends that would become important future affiliations: "I was incredibly lucky to find the right friends at the Academy: Sigmar Polke, Konrad Fischer and [Blinky] Palermo."40 The three artists exhibited together in May 1963 in an empty shop in Düsseldorf's old town centre, rented from the local civic administration. And in October, Richter and Lueg organised an exhibition and event at a furniture store in the city. Entitled Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism, the initiative involved an exhibition of the artist's paintings and a happening in which they performed as "living sculptures" in a mock living room with a variety of props, including an effigy of (the then still living) John F. Kennedy. Also featured was an installation in a cupboard by Beuys, suggesting the influence Fluxus had on Richter and his circle. "I was very impressed with Fluxus. It was so absurd and destructive,"41 Richter has commented. The furniture store exhibition generated a considerable amount of interest and was characteristic of the energy, curiosity, humour and spirit shared by Richter and his peers at the time. The young men payed close attention to the Pop Art movement taking form across the Atlantic. Each of them absorbed different elements of this into their own thinking and practice and became some of the most influential contributors – even as students – to the European rendition of the movement. Richter's interest in current affairs, consumer society, the media and popular culture began to come through in his paintings, with early examples including Party [CR: 2-1], depicting a scene from a televised New Year's Eve party; Table [CR:1], based on a table in the Italian design magazine Domus; President Johnson consoles Mrs. Kennedy [CR: 11-2], from a newspaper cutting; and Folding Dryer [CR: 4], reproducing an advert, including text, for a clothes dryer. These works were the beginning of Richter's professional oeuvre and it was the use of photographic images – something that had previously been inconceivable to him and to academic painting – that marked the pivotal breakthrough.42 Already at this early stage, Richter set about exploring the relationship between the photographic image and painting that would become one of the cornerstones of his practice. He produced some of the first works that incorporated his "blurring" technique, such as Pedestrians [CR: 6] and Alster [CR: 10], as well as beginning a series of paintings depicting military jets, along with an increasing number of portraits, primarily in black and white, based on media images and found photographs. By the time Richter left the Academy in the summer of 1964, it was with a newly developed approach that would sustain him for decades to come. Towards the end of his studies at the Düsseldorf Academy, Richter had laid the foundations for his practice, setting up an interchange between photography and painting that was to be equally important for him as for later art-historical accounts of the Post-War period. Just before the end of term in 1964, Munich-based gallerist Heiner Friedrich invited Richter to feature in an exhibition alongside Peter Klasen. This proved to be a fruitful relationship over the next eight years, involving several exhibitions that increased Richter’s visibility outside Düsseldorf. Alfred Schmela and René Block were other important gallerists that supported Richter early on: in September 1964, Schmela gave Richter his first solo exhibition and Block featured Richter's work in a show titled Neodada, Pop, Décollage, Kapitalistischer Realismus. Richter was dissatisfied with the Capitalist Realism label that followed him from his student exhibitions but had established a good relationship with Block and so agreed to a solo exhibition in November 1964. In the same month, he was also shown alongside Lueg and Polke at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal.43 Within six months of leaving art school, Richter was exhibiting with several commercial galleries and collectors had started to show interest. While he continued to supplement his income over the next few years through various jobs, including teaching, this was a successful start to his career as an artist. Working from photographs liberated Richter from conventional painterly subjects: "Stags, aircraft, kings, secretaries. Not having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by painting – colour, composition, space – and all the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly, none of this was a prior necessity for art."44 Richter was interested in the dialectic between objectivity and subjectivity that he felt painting from photographs engendered. "When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated,"45 Richter mused in his personal writings of 1964-5. "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."46 Despite the eclecticism of Richter's early practice, he was manifestly drawn to certain subjects - affinities that were to become more apparent over the course of the coming years. Military aircraft, family portraits (of his own family and others) and groups of people were characteristic of Richter's works from this time, including The Liechti Family [CR:117], Meeting [CR: 119], and Hunting Party [CR: 121]. Images found in newspapers and magazines recurred as source material for these paintings. Robert Storr has commented on an overarching theme: "Throughout Richter's early career [...] consciousness of death is, explicitly or implicitly, the defining characteristic of numerous works. Like Warhol did in his Disaster paintings, Richter picked up on the public's horrid fascination with suffering and the media's exploitation of it."47 This became overt in works such as Dead [CR: 9], which depicts the body of a man crushed under a large block of ice, Coffin Bearers [CR: 5], and Woman with Umbrella [CR: 29], which reproduces a photograph of Jackie Kennedy crying in the street after her husband's assassination. In 1965, Richter painted Uncle Rudi [CR: 85], showing his maternal uncle who served as a Wehrmacht (German army) officer until his death in 1944. He also depicted another family member that had been lost in the war in Aunt Marianne [CR: 87], his mother’s sister who had died though the Nazi eugenics programme. It is presumably no coincidence that Richter painted Mr Heyde [CR: 100] shortly after, a psychiatrist who had been deeply involved with this programme. The themes of death and murder continued the following year in Helga Matura [CR: 124], relating to a murdered sex worker, and in Eight Student Nurses [CR: 130], the portraits of eight young women that had recently been murdered in Chicago. 1966 proved to be a significant year for Richter, with further exhibitions at Friedrich's and Block's galleries and opportunities to exhibit abroad, notably at Galleria la Tartaruga in Rome and City-Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich. He painted one of his most celebrated works, Ema (Nude on a Staircase) [CR: 134] and introduced the element of geometric abstraction to his practice through the Colour Charts [CR: 135-144]. When asked by Benjamin Buchloh in 1986 whether this departure had been influenced by the work of Blinky Palermo, Richter explained: "Yes, it certainly did have something to do with Palermo and his interests, and later with Minimal art as well; but when I painted my first colour charts in 1966, that had more to do with Pop Art. They were copies of paint sample cards [...]."48 This investigation of colour and tone continued into the 1970s and paved the way for Richter's future abstract works. The geometric element has remained a persistent influence in Richter's oeuvre, re-emerging, for example, in the design for Cologne Cathedral's stained- glass window [CR: 900], realised in 2007. Beginning with Ema (Nude on a Staircase), works featuring women, particularly nudes and erotic images, were common in Richter's work during 1967. In 1968, his attention was drawn towards aerial views of towns and cities, another route into increasingly abstract territory. Cathedral Square, Milan [CR: 169] was followed by views of Madrid, Paris and other cities, indicative of a looser, more gestural type of painting. Storr has made the connection between Richter's townscapes and pre-war and post-war Europe: "[...] They and others like them – as well as the earlier Administrative Building [CR: 39] of 1964 – are reflections on the new face of Europe and on the other surviving remnants of the old one."49 The townscapes of 1968 were joined by a substantial number of works depicting mountain ranges. This marked a new foray into landscape, another lasting genre of Richter's, signaling a desire to move away from the human figure and manmade environments.50 Between 1968 and 69 he painted several images of Corsica, where he had been on holiday with his wife Ema and first daughter Betty.51 These artworks were beginning to show Richter's growing and complicated relationship with romanticism and coincided with further explorations of abstractions, ranging from the grisaille Shadow Pictures to grey monochromes, from the Corrugated Iron series to the Colour Streak paintings.52 1968 was a year that demonstrated Richter's urge to push his practice forward, to experiment and to establish his own artistic voice. By the end of the 1960s Richter had established himself as a successful contemporary artist. There were further solo exhibitions with Block and the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, as well as his first dedicated solo exhibition in a public institution, the Gegenverkehr e.V. Zentrum für aktuelle Kunst, Aachen, in the spring of 1969. He was featured in group exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, Tokyo and New York – the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum included him in a show called 'Nine Young Artists'. Despite this success, however, Richter was feeling uncertain about the future. He had opened many potential avenues for exploration and was searching for a direction. The 1970s would begin with an extensive series of grey paintings as Richter started experimenting seriously with abstraction as a means for questioning the limits of representation. As the 1970s began, Richter's career was gathering momentum and his international reputation had started to rise. In the spring of 1970 he exhibited with Konrad Fischer, who, since their time together at the Düsseldorf Academy, had become a successful gallerist.53 Fischer's gallery was at the cutting edge of contemporary art during this time, focusing on Minimalism, Conceptualism and Formalism (exhibiting artists like Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman, Fred Sandback, On Kawara, Richard Long and Sol LeWitt). This provided Richter with a new context for painting at a time when it was considered by many to be outdated.54 Robert Storr has said that "Richter felt more at home with much of this new work than he did with that of other painters then on the rise."55 It allowed Richter to address painting outside of its traditions and to develop methods that related to the issues art was facing at the time. Questioning painting in this way was fundamental to Richter’s practice as it developed throughout the 1970s. An exhibition at the Museum Folkwang in Essen in the autumn of 1970 offered Richter the opportunity to present some of the photographs, sketches and newspaper and magazine cuttings he had amassed since the 1960s. He had slowly started organising such material earlier that year – an undertaking that was the precursor to Richter establishing his Atlas. Elger explains: "Since the late 1960s Richter had felt the need to vet and organize the mass of visual material he had accumulated and to make it presentable."56 Presented on cardboard panels and grouped in themes relating to the development of works, Atlas has since been exhibited many times – including as part of documenta X in 1997.57 It has acquired the status of an artwork in its own right and signaled a new generation of artists whose practices were not confined within one medium. In 1971, Richter returned to the geometric abstractions as first seen in the Colour Charts. This time he introduced the element of chance in the selection of colours rather than referring directly to industrial paint charts as he had done in 1966. The grids and colours became more varied, from 4 Colours [CR: 353-1], 1024 Colours [CR: 351], using as many as 4096 squares in 4096 Colours [CR: 359]. After 1974, Richter did not create any grid paintings until 2007, pursuing abstraction in other directions instead. The Grey paintings, for example, would become increasingly prominent in Richter's practice throughout the decade. They were rooted in experiments from 1967, ‘68 and ‘69, and became part of a considerable effort to push the limits of painting as a representative medium. In 1974, 31 Grey paintings were shown at the Städtisches Museum in Mönchengladbach. A few years before this breakthrough in abstraction, Richter was invited to represent Germany at the 36th Venice Biennale. This, followed by his inclusion in documenta 5, cemented his reputation as an important contemporary artist. For the Biennale Richter created 48 Portraits [CR: 324/1-48]. The series consist of 48 canvases depicting famous men from the previous two centuries, including scientists, composers, philosophers and writers. Using a reductive grey-scale, these figures are presented in close- up, using encyclopedia photographs as source material. Although similar to some earlier portraits, like Portrait Schmela [CR: 37/1-3], this impersonal portrayal of distinguished historical figures delves into the history of formal portraiture on a much grander scale. The 48 Portraits have been interpreted in many ways since their first presentation.58 48 Portraits took up a significant proportion of Richter's time in late 1971 and early 1972. Richter's output in 1972 mainly consisted of abstract works. As part of his ongoing series of Grey paintings, he started producing what he referred to as Vermalung, or Inpaintings. In general, these are works that might have started out as figurative images, but which Richter reworked or 'painted into' to such a degree that any original imagery is virtually or entirely obliterated. These paintings point to Richter's interest as a student in Art Informel. Unlike the soft and calculated blurring of his photo paintings, the Inpaintings are distinguished by gestural impasto, with the sweeping, swirling path of the brush marks clearly visible. This method could be detected in a number of earlier works: the townscapes and streak paintings of 1968-69, the Constellation paintings of 1969 and several individual pieces such as Two Women at a Table [CR: 196-2], Untitled (Grey) [CR: 194-6], Grey [CR: 247-13] and Untitled (Evening) [CR: 293-3]. The group Untitled (Green) [CR: 313-319] demonstrates the logic of the Inpaintings; based in the figuration of Park Piece [CR: 310] they move into the increasing abstraction of the brown, grey, and red-blue-yellow series of 1972. Elger has commented that "The application of paint in the grey and the red-blue-yellow Inpaintings is gestural without being expressive. Richter pulls the paint in emotionless paths over the canvas."59 For Richter, the Inpaintings were another means of removing expression as a driving force in painting. He used this erasure to draw attention to the painterly gesture – another example being the photo-enlargement paintings. Storr has aligned these with Richter's practice at the time: "Interspersed with Richter's landscapes of 1970-71, and recurring on a grand scale in 1973 and 1979, were paintings based on photo- enlargements of brushstrokes or whirling pools of mottled pigment."60 Capturing individual brush strokes of other paintings, the photo-enlargement paintings zoomed in on the very act of painting as a vehicle for miming abstraction. The Colour Charts, Grey paintings, Inpaintings and photo-enlargements represent Richter's growing commitment to abstraction as a counter-model to figurative painting.61 Alongside his American peers, including Elsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly, Richter was working to come to terms with the possibilities offered by abstraction and minimalism. As Storr explains: "From 1968 through 1976 the monochrome preoccupied him, but by the latter part of the decade it became apparent to him that there was no way he could paint himself out of the grey corner he had been led into by the example of minimalism and his own anti-expressive inclinations."62 The 1970s were not the happiest years in Richter's private life, with his marriage to Ema becoming increasingly strained and gradually coming to an end. This was reflected in his work, as demonstrated by the bleak monochromes and grisaille Inpaintings. Figurative work such as the 1975 series entitled Seascape [CR: 375-378], depicting a desolate arctic sea, also carries a melancholy, inspired by Caspar David Friedrich's The Wreck of Hope.63 Described by Elger as an "artistic cul-de-sac,"64 the point that Richter had reached by 1976 seemed like a dead end Richter's unhappiness was compounded by the unexpected and premature death of his friend Blinky Palermo during a holiday on Kurumba Island in the Maldives. 1977 saw a breakthrough in two directions. Richter created two sculptural pieces made of panes of glass painted in grey: Pane of Glass [CR: 415/1-2] and Double Pane of Glass [CR: 416]. The grey surface was altered through the intervention of glass, or more specifically, reflection, something Richter would explore further in the 1990s and early 2000s. There was also the development of a substantial number of colourful abstract works described simply as Abstraktes Bild [Abstract Painting]. Gone – at least for a while – were the greys and browns, substituted with bold and bright colours in different patterns, textures, surfaces and techniques. These offered an energetic investigation into optics and perception, planes, depth, space, shape, form, colour and light. It was to be a significant phase of his practice that continued well into the early 1980s and laid the foundations for future bodies of work including Sinbad [CR: 905/1-100], 2008, and Aladdin [CR: 913 and 915], 2010. In the spring of 1979, Richter and Ema formally separated. But the end of a difficult decade also marked the start of a new chapter. A decade that began with grey could not have ended with more colour. The struggle to map out and come to terms with the possibilities of abstraction was paying off. In the early 1980s, painting was reaffirming its status in the art world, with neo- expressionism (or Neue Wilde as it was sometimes referred to in Germany) heading its revival. In the US, figures such as Philip Guston and Julian Schnabel were leading practitioners, and in Germany Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer had risen to fame. In early 1981, an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London entitled A New Spirit in Painting brought many of these artists together - including Richter. Robert Storr has described Richter as a forerunner to these changes: "Richter's engagement with expressionist-type painting antedates this movement by several years, but he was doubtless aware of this current as it began to well up around him and as he was lumped together with its exponents in a number of exhibitions as the tendency crested."65 The exhibition nonetheless brought Richter to a wider audience. Alongside German Art Today at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and a solo show in Munich, the decade started well. Towards the end of the 1970s, Richter had found a new direction with his Abstract Paintings. His personal life had also undergone changes: he had divorced his wife Ema and began a close relationship with artist Isa Genzken. They first met in the early 1970s when she was a student and Richter became reacquainted later in the decade when she was established as a successful artist. By the early 1980s, Genzken and Richter were living together in Düsseldorf, and they married in 1982. The following year they were offered a large studio space in a former factory in Bismarckstrasse in Cologne by Richter's gallerist Rudolf Zwirner, which they accepted, leaving Düsseldorf and Richter's studio in Brückenstrasse behind. The main question facing Richter after the success with his abstractions was in what direction to take his figurative work. Between 1982 and 1983 Richter created a series of work depicting candles. Although they received little attention when first exhibited in Germany, they have come to be regarded as some of Richter's most iconic works. Painted with a muted but complex palette ranging from earthy browns and coppers through dusty greys, shadowy blues, dim greens and musty beiges, the candles – often a single candle, though occasionally two or three per image – are depicted against minimal backgrounds comprising bare walls, plain tabletops and dark doorways. Using chiaroscuro and blurring, the Candle paintings offered a fresh approach to photo painting that also served to distinguish him from the neo-expressionist fashions of the time. Landscapes also confirmed their position in Richter's oeuvre in the 1980s. Ever since his Corsica paintings [CR: 199-201, 211, 212] of the late 1960s, Richter had periodically returned to the subject, each time integrating it further with his core themes. While the Davos paintings [CR: 468/1-3, 469-1] of 1981 and the Iceberg paintings [CR: 496/1-2] of 1982 had extended Richter's interest in the sublime and German romanticism, landscape paintings of 1983 and 84 were more down to earth, depicting rural farmland areas. In works such as Barn [CR: 549-1], Meadow [CR: 549-2] and Rhinescape [CR: 550-3] it is the Rhineland, close to Richter's home, which is presented. The Abstract Paintings [CR 551/1-9] that follow on from these landscapes in 1984 show how closely aligned Richter's figurative and abstract work really was, with blue skies and horizons serving to anchor otherwise entirely abstract marks. In 1985, Richter produced a number of landscapes including Staubach [CR: 572-1], Troisdorf [CR: 572-2] and Buschdorf [CR:572-5] that were more subdued and set the tone for his future landscapes, which Dietmar Elger observes "culminated in 1987 with twenty-three field and meadow pieces."66 In 1988, Richter made a series of photo paintings in a starkly different direction. October 18, 1977 [CR: 667-674], a cycle of paintings relating to the day several members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) - also known as the Baader-Meinhof group - died in prison, was to be one of Richter's most significant and discussed bodies of work. The RAF was a group that Storr has described as "student radicals turned armed revolutionaries"67 who carried out a range of terrorist acts in the 1970s. Their deaths were treated as suicides, though their unusual circumstances raised suspicions that they might have been killed by agents of the state. Richter's series of blurred, grisaille paintings depicted key moments from the events leading up to and surrounding their deaths, including the arrest of three members of the group on the morning of 1st June 1972, member Gudrun Ensslin hanging in her cell on October 18, 1977, and the funeral following their deaths on October 27, 1977. This was Richter's most politically provocative body of work to date, and even though the work was made more than ten years after the events, it was still a subject that touched a raw nerve with the German public, opening up the debate about a "disaffected generation, a generation for the most part born after the war and at odds with that of their parents who had acquiesced to, if not supported, Hitler."68 Richter's works seemed to crystallise this debate, although he resisted commenting on it himself.69 Speaking about the RAF in 1989, Richter asserted that what he found most inexplicable was how humans "produce ideas, which are almost always not only utterly wrong and nonsensical but above all dangerous."70 Another work produced in 1988 proved to be one of Richter's most popular works of all time and could not have been more different to the October cycle. Betty [CR: 663-5] is a portrait of Richter's daughter Betty as a young girl (by the time of painting she was a young adult). She sits close to the picture plane, wearing a red and white floral hooded cardigan or dressing gown, facing away from the viewer, seemingly into a dark grey void – a void which on closer inspection reveals itself as one of Richter's grey abstract canvases. Such work helped launch Richter into the public sphere beyond the art market and gallery sector. By the end of the 1980s, Richter was among the most prominent painters in both Germany and the world. His first major retrospective, which started in 1986 at the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and travelled to Berlin, Bern and Vienna, was greeted with critical acclaim. His gallery representation was shifting too, with Marian Goodman in New York and Anthony d'Offay in London taking the lead as Richter's representation. The 1980s had been a highly successful decade, seeing both his abstract works and photo paintings reach a point of acclaim that matched his status and reputation. As the 1990s began, Richter was busy with Abstract Paintings, which he devoted his time to almost exclusively for the first year. After a hectic couple of years with both production and exhibitions, Richter needed some time to settle down in the studio and he postponed several exhibitions to which he had been committed. In 1991, he returned to the medium of mirrors, which he had first explored a decade earlier in four pieces [CR: 470/1-2, 485/1-2]. In 1989 Richter had the chance to work with glass and colour for a private commission [Stained-Glass Window, 625 Colours, [703]]. The combination offered a fertile terrain for Richter, and 1991 saw him complete an array of works that drew on this dormant interest in minimalist abstraction. According to the official catalogue raisonné of Richter’s work, three rectangular works entitled Mirror, Grey [CR: 735/1-3] were produced first, using glass coated with grey pigment. The grey works were immediately followed by eight works entitled Mirror, Blood Red [CR: 736/1-8] and then by two pairs with complementary colour schemes, Corner Mirror, Brown-Blue [CR: 737-1] and Corner Mirror, Green-Red [CR: 737-2]. Almost 20 more grey mirrors then followed before the end of 1992. His Abstract Paintings also leant toward the more structured and minimalist end of abstraction. Stripes and grids dominated. The close resemblance of these abstractions suggested that Richter was experimenting but looking for something specific, following a route of "painterly research."71 Several Abstract Paintings of 1987 [CR: 621, 643/1-5] had sown the seeds for what Richter was striving for in 1992, working with horizontal and vertical striations to counteract the depth and flatness of the picture plane. The challenge equally seemed to involve unifying bright colours with the more muted, melancholy palette to which Richter was periodically drawn. It was a subject he had addressed back in 1972 with his Red-Blue-Yellow works [CR: 327-339] in which he had investigated the processes and stages of the muddying of primary colours through the mixing of paint. Returning to this theme 20 years later, Richter's first significant works to synthesise these elements was a cycle of four paintings titled Bach [CR: 785-788], 1992. Each canvas measures three by three metres and while he had worked on even larger canvases in the past, these were in many ways the new benchmark for Richter's Abstract Paintings, paving the way for future cycles - in particular the Cage paintings [CR: 897/1-6] of 2006, alongside which they were displayed at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2008. In 1993, Richter created a series of paintings of his wife, Isa Genzken, in which she poses with her back to the artist [CR: 790/1-5]. Some commentators have suggested that the tone of the paintings is one of detachment. Shortly after, the couple separated. A year later, Richter met the artist Sabine Moritz and they soon got married. A comparable series of paintings of Sabine shows her facing the viewer. With a warm tone comparable to his painting Betty from 1988, Reader [CR: 799-1, 804] depicts her in profile, illuminated from behind, reading a magazine. A series of eight paintings from 1995 of Sabine with newborn son Moritz [CR: 827/1-8] are among the most intimate and personal of Richter's oeuvre, described by Robert Storr as having "an almost palpable tenderness"72 and by Dietmar Elger as depicting "domestic bliss."73 With daughter Ella Maria born a year after Moritz, in the summer of 1996 the family moved into their newly built home in Hahnwald, south of Cologne. Richter continued primarily producing abstract works in the 1990s, only occasionally interspersing them with a photo painting. Speaking about this in 1999, Richter commented, "I love figurative painting and find it very interesting. I've not done a lot of figurative work because I lack subjects. Abstract is something everyday for me, as natural as walking or breathing."74 The photo paintings produced continued to show personal and intimate subjects, including [Hahnwald, CR: 840-1], Orchid [CR: 848-9], Seascape [CR: 852-1], and Summer Day [CR: 859-1]. Richter's output during this time was lower than usual due to the artist having suffered a stroke in late summer of 1998, from which he made a swift recovery. Another genre in Richter's oeuvre which would grow to become more noticeable in the 1990s was the Overpainted Photographs, which he had been working on since c.1986. Currently, Sils-Maria from 1987 counts as the earliest Overpainted Photograph. Since the mid 1980s, Richter has produced over 2,000 Overpainted Photographs, including the edition Firenze (2000), which consists of almost 120 works – or Museum Visit (2011) comprising 234 works. These works offer another way for Richter to negotiate the languages of figuration, abstraction and the photograph, often with considerable impact and striking effect. Towards the end of the millennium, Richter received an important commission from the German government. Richter and Sigmar Polke were invited to create works for the entrance hall of the Reichstag building in Berlin. Elger's account documents Richter's original hope to address the subject of the Holocaust with this commission, but the artist eventually decided on something more apolitical, opting to make a work based on the German national colours black, red and gold. Ultimately, Black, Red and Gold [CR: 856] took the form of six large, thin rectangular glass panels, coloured with black, red and gold enamel; two panels per colour – the German flag in the format of a long vertical strip. The combined length of the panels came to over 20 metres. Richter had envisaged monumental works for a long time, evident from drawings in the Atlas, and so this commission would see a new aspect realised - alongside the canonisation of Richter as a national artist. "Well, after this century of grand proclamations and terrible illusions, I hope for an era in which real and tangible accomplishments, and not grand proclamations, are the only things that count."75 At the turn of the century, Richter remained focused on his Abstract Paintings - three paintings of his young son Moritz being the most notable exception [CR: 863/1-3]. Eight Grey [CR: 874/1-8] of 2001 heralded a number of works that continued the experimentation with glass. Works such as Pane of Glass [CR: 876-1], 4 Standing Panes [CR: 877-1] and 7 Standing Panes [CR: 879-1] demonstrated an interest in pushing wall-based works into the realm of the sculptural. Themes that the artist had worked with for a long time - transparency, translucency, opacity and reflection - took centre stage. In 2002, MoMA in New York held a major retrospective of Richter's work, titled Forty Years of Painting. Curated by Robert Storr, the exhibition featured 190 works and was one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of Richter's oeuvre to date. It was also the exhibition that confirmed his status as one of the leading artists in the world. His introduction to the United States was described by Storr as "long overdue"76 in the catalogue. Richter continued to draw inspiration from current events, as he had done in the 1960s. A series of large paintings titled Silicate [CR: 885/1-4] were inspired by an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 12 March 2003 about new possibilities of microscopic vision. These paintings are the most biomorphic of the abstract works in Richter's oeuvre, depicting cell formations and genetic sequences as seen under the microscope.77 A more overt political reference was to be seen in the work September [CR: 891-5] from 2005, in many ways a stylistic departure at the time, which depicted the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001. In a 2010 publication about the painting Storr wrote: "What is the meaning of a single, small, almost abstract depiction of one of the most consequential occurrences in recent world history?"78 The painting shows the two towers against a blue sky, but the point of the impact has been erased by gestures akin of those in the Inpaintings. Through this act of withdrawal, the enormity and significance of the event is shared with viewers through their knowledge of it, much like with the October 18, 1977 cycle. September was described by critic Bryan Appleyard of The Sunday Times as "the closest you will get to a great 9/11 work,"79 because "it reclaim[ed] the day, leaving it exactly where it was, exactly when it happened."80 2006 saw the creation of a dedicated cycle of Abstract Paintings entitled Cage [CR: 897/1- 6]. These six large-scale canvases, described by Nicholas Serota as "magisterial,"81 were named after the American avant-garde composer John Cage, whose work Richter felt had a deep resonance with his own. In a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Richter said that he had been listening to the music of Cage whilst working in his studio at the time. To Jan Thorn-Prikker he stated: "That's roughly how Cage put it: 'I have nothing to say and I am saying it.' I have always thought that was a wonderful quote. It's the best chance we have to be able to keep on going."82 The concluding line in Storr's 2009 publication devoted to the series, Cage – Six Paintings by Gerhard Richter, references the Cage quote, stating: "In his own idiom, and for his own reasons, [the Cage paintings] are Richter's beautiful way of saying nothing, and as such, of once more declaring his uncompromising independence."83 In 2008 the Cage paintings were shown alongside the Bach paintings at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, after which they were acquired by Tate Modern, London where they are on permanent display. In 2007, Richter completed another commission - a large stained-glass window for Cologne Cathedral to replace one that had been destroyed during the Second World War. He had been invited to undertake the commission back in 2002 and devoted considerable time to the project during the five years. In notes prepared for a conference in July 2006, Richter wrote: “In early 2002, the master builder of the cathedral suggested that I develop a glass design for the southern window. The guiding principle was the representation of six martyrs, in keeping with the period. I was, of course, very touched to have such an honour bestowed upon me, but I soon realised I wasn't at all qualified for the task. After several unsuccessful attempts to get to grips with the subject, and prepared to finally concede failure, I happened upon a large representation of my painting with 4096 colours. I put the template for the design of the window over it and saw that this was the only possibility.”84 In Richter's design, 11,000 mouth-blown squares, each measuring 94 x 94 mm, were used, with half of these selected randomly by a computer programme and the other half mirroring the first. As well as an evolution of his Colour Charts from the 1960s and 70s, the Cologne Cathedral Window [CR: 900] was also informed by Glass Window, 625 Colours [CR: 703] of 1989. The process of working with the design for the Cathedral has been documented extensively in a film by Corinna Belz released in 2007.85 In 2008, Richter embarked on a significant body of colourful abstract work entitled Sinbad [CR: 905]. Consisting of 100 small paintings in enamel on the back of glass, Sinbad is the first series of works by Richter to allude to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). Sinbad was followed in 2010 by Aladdin [CR: 913, 915]. That the artist was clearly thinking a lot about the Middle East is illustrated by the related series Baghdad [CR: 914], 2010 and Abdallah [CR: 917], 2010. As his Abstract Paintings of the 2000s had grown more sombre, these works picked up the brighter palettes that Richter had engaged in the abstract works of the late 1970s and early 80s. The first decade in the new millennium also saw Richter use digital technology in his practice. In the works entitled Strip [CR: 920-921] from 2011, digital prints mounted between aluminium and acrylic glass, with long horizontal stripes of varying thickness, span a length of 3 meters. The colour of each stripe is based on a digital manipulation of an earlier Abstract Painting, creating another layer to Richter's experimentation with the painterly gesture, photography, and representation, akin to that of the photo-enlargement paintings of the 1970s. The 2010s has been a decade of consolidation for Richter. Successful retrospectives and exhibitions have been curated across the globe, including Gerhard Richter: Panorama in London, Berlin and Paris; Gerhard Richter: Survey in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico; and Gerhard Richter: Painting 1992-2017 in Tokyo – alongside exhibitions dedicated to his Atlas, Overpainted Photographs and editions. Being considered one of the most influential living artists of our time, he increasingly participates in the art world dialogue, discussing topics like the future and purpose of art. Turning 80 in 2012 has done little to slow down Richter's productivity, and he continues to take his practice in new directions. https:// www.gerhard-richter.com/en/ biography
![“Art is the highest form of hope” ~ Gerhard Richter Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden on 9th February 1932, the first child of Horst and Hildegard Richter. A daughter, Gisela, followed four years later. They were in many respects an average middle-class family: Horst worked as a teacher at a secondary school in Dresden and Hildegard was a bookseller who liked to play the piano.1 In an interview with Robert Storr, Richter described his early family life as "simple, orderly, structured – mother playing the piano and father earning money."2 In 1935, Horst accepted a teaching position at a school in Reichenau, a town which today is known as Bogatynia in Poland, at the time located in the German province Saxony. Settling in Reichenau was a drastic change for the family, which was accustomed to the vivid cultural life of the larger Dresden.3 Yet, it was also a move which would keep the family largely safe from the coming war. In the late 1930s Horst was conscripted into the German army, captured by Allied forces and detained as a prisoner of war until Germany's defeat. In 1946, he was released and returned to his family, who had again relocated, this time to Waltersdorf, a village on the Czech border. The post-war years caused difficulties for the Richter family, as for many others. Horst’s return was not that of a war-hero. Commenting on this period in later life, Richter reflected: "[Horst] shared most father's fate at the time [...] nobody wanted them."4 In an interview from 2004, he added: "[we] were so alienated that we didn't know how to deal with each other."5 Horst’s former membership of the National Socialist Party, which all teachers had been obliged to join under the Nazi regime, made it difficult for him to return to teaching. He eventually ended up working in a textile mill in nearby in Zittau, before finding a post as an administrator of a distance learning programme for an educational institution in Dresden.6 Richter has remarked on his early years with a mixture of fondness and frustration, sadness and excitement. He reminisced about the house in which he was born, on Grossenhainer Strasse in Dresden: "[it] was not far from the original Circus Sarrasani building, where – as a young boy – I could see the elephant stalls through the cellar windows. I remember my great-grandmother's sewing box, made of armadillo skin, and a man falling from a ladder – something that, according to my parents, only I had seen."7 Not much is documented about Richter's time in Reichenau, but he has talked about his experiences of Waltersdorf: "we had moved to a new village, and automatically I was an outsider. I couldn't speak the dialect and so on."8 In 1942, because he turned 10 years old, Richter was required to join the ‘Pimpfen’, a mandatory organisation for children that prepared them for the Hitler Youth. Later, Richter attended grammar school in Zittau but eventually dropped out. He has been described as "a highly gifted child but notoriously bad in school,"9 with Dietmar Elger noting that "he even got poor grades in drawing."10 He ended up attending a vocational school instead, studying stenography, bookkeeping, and Russian. While too young to be drafted into the German army during the Second World War, the war nonetheless had a deep impact on Richter. The family experienced economic hardship and personal loss: Hildegard's brothers, Rudi and Alfred, and sister, Marianne, all died as a consequence of the war. "It was sad when my mother's brothers fell in battle. First the one, then the other. I'll never forget how the women screamed,"11 Richter recalls. Marianne, who suffered from mental health problems, was starved to death in a psychiatric clinic.12 Even though Waltersdorf was spared the extensive bombing that nearby Dresden was exposed to, it was not sheltered. Speaking to Jan-Thorn Prikker, Richter has said: "the retreating German soldiers, the convoys, the low-flying Russian planes shooting at refugees, the trenches, the weapons lying around everywhere, artillery, broken down cars. Then the invasion of the Russians [...] ransacking, rapes, a huge camp where us kids sometimes got barley soup."13 As a child, the military had fascinated Richter: "When the soldiers came through the village, I went up to them and wanted to join them."14 He explained to Storr: "when you're twelve years old you're too little to understand all that ideological hocus- pocus."15 Richter remembers playing in the woods and trenches with his friends, shooting with forgotten rifles which they found lying around: "I thought it was great. [...] I was fascinated, like all kids."16 The bombings of Dresden made an enduring impression on Richter: "in the night, everyone came out onto the street of our village 100 kilometres away. Dresden was being bombed, "now, at this moment!"17 Following the Potsdam agreement at the end of the war, the area in which Richter lived fell under Soviet control. The Second World War profoundly changed the face of the country that Richter had been born into, which had a lasting effect on Richter's education and later artistic practice. Richter's interest in art and culture began to take shape in the aftermath of the Second World War. He receives a simple plate camera as a Christmas gift from his mother. Werner Jungmichel, a camera shop owner in Waltersdorf teaches the young Richter how to develop photographs, a skill that will prove useful throughout his career. As the eastern part of Germany became the GDR (German Democratic Republic), political uncertainty was accompanied by a shifting cultural status quo: "It was very nasty, [but] when the Russians came to our village and expropriated the houses of the rich who had already left or were driven out, they made libraries for the people out of these houses. And that was fantastic."14 Richter has recalled suddenly being able to access books that had been forbidden under Nazi rule: "Cesare Lombroso's Genius and Madness, Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Feuchtwanger, all that middle-class literature. It was a wonderful, care-free time ... made it easy to forget the dark side of things.”15 Richter's mother encouraged her son's interest in literature, and, as Dietmar Elger has noted, it was this "endless supply of illustrated books that prompted his own first drawings."16 In an interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, Richter described how he learnt about art "from books and from the little folios with art prints that you used to get then – I remember Diego Velázquez, Albrecht Dürer, Lovis Corinth [...] It was simply a matter of what was around, what we saw and bought for ourselves."17 Around the age of 15, Richter started to draw regularly. One of his early sketches, from 1946, was a nude figure copied from a book, which his parents reacted to with both pride and embarrassment. He also created landscapes and self-portraits, working mainly with watercolours. In a 2002 interview with Robert Storr, Richter describes a watercolour showing a group of people dancing, drawn in Waltersdorf: "I was at a club, watching the others dance, and I was jealous and bitter and annoyed. So in the watercolour, all this anger is included, at 16. It was the same with the poems I was writing – very romantic, but bitter and nihilistic, like Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse."18 In 1947, while still studying in Zittau, Richter started taking evening classes in painting. Little has been documented about these first painting lessons, although Elger notes that before completing the course, Richter felt he gained enough skill to match his instructors. Yet, on completing his bookkeeping studies in 1948, Richter was still not considering becoming a professional artist. Instead, Richter left Waltersdorf for Zittau to become an apprentice, a common route into a career during the 1940s. He mulled over an array of professions, including forestry, dentistry and lithography, eventually finding employment with a company that produced banners for the GDR government. Here, his main task was cleaning old banners and readying them for being painted again. Storr recounts that during his five months in this post, Richter never had the opportunity to actually paint any of the banners himself. In February 1950, he was taken on as an assistant set painter for the municipal theatre in Zittau. During his few months there, he worked on productions for Goethe's Faust and Schiller's William Tell. His career in the theatre ended abruptly however, when Richter refused to do a wall painting on the theatre's staircases and was promptly dismissed. Soon after leaving the theatre, Richter applied to study painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden [Dresden Art Academy]. It is unclear whether he had been planning to do so, or whether his dismissal prompted him to consider a fresh start. But it was clearly a decision to which he remained committed, even after his first application was rejected. The examiners advised him to find a job with a state-run organisation, as state employees were given preferential treatment in applications at the time. During the following eight months Richter worked as a painter at the Dewag textile plant in Zittau. In the summer of 1951, he returned to his birth city Dresden, ready to begin his formal art studies. In 1961, Richter and his wife Ema defected to West Germany from the increasingly repressive GDR. They stayed with a friend, Reinhard Graner, in Düsseldorf for the first few weeks. Initially Richter considered moving to Munich, but following advice from Graner chose to settle in Düsseldorf. The city’s Staatliche Kunstakademie [Düsseldorf Art Academy] had a considerable reputation and featured largely in Richter’s final decision. Despite having already studied art at the Dresden Academy, Richter decided to apply, seeking the opportunity to integrate with his new environment, meet peers and broaden his knowledge of contemporary art. As a student he would also receive a stipend, which would help him during the first few years in the West. Richter started studying at the Düsseldorf Academy in October 1961, in Ferdinand Macketanz's class. An intensely productive period followed: "I tried out everything I could."38 He later described his work at the time as "varying in style between Dubuffet, Giacometti, Tàpies, and many others."39 While Richter was unhappy with and destroyed many of these paintings, it was an important period of experimentation that helped to establish him in the Academy. In the 1960s, the Academy was at the forefront of developments in the art world. In addition to being a bastion of Informel painting, it became a hub for the Fluxus movement when Joseph Beuys was appointed professor. Düsseldorf and nearby Cologne offered a vibrant community of artists, exhibitions and events - energised not least by the ZERO group, founded by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack in 1957. Richter had arrived in the midst of all this, and many aspects of this environment would remain sources of long-lasting inspiration. After his first term, Richter moved into the class of Karl Otto Götz, who had been attracting some of the most interesting students at the Academy. Amongst these Richter would find a circle of friends that would become important future affiliations: "I was incredibly lucky to find the right friends at the Academy: Sigmar Polke, Konrad Fischer and [Blinky] Palermo."40 The three artists exhibited together in May 1963 in an empty shop in Düsseldorf's old town centre, rented from the local civic administration. And in October, Richter and Lueg organised an exhibition and event at a furniture store in the city. Entitled Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism, the initiative involved an exhibition of the artist's paintings and a happening in which they performed as "living sculptures" in a mock living room with a variety of props, including an effigy of (the then still living) John F. Kennedy. Also featured was an installation in a cupboard by Beuys, suggesting the influence Fluxus had on Richter and his circle. "I was very impressed with Fluxus. It was so absurd and destructive,"41 Richter has commented. The furniture store exhibition generated a considerable amount of interest and was characteristic of the energy, curiosity, humour and spirit shared by Richter and his peers at the time. The young men payed close attention to the Pop Art movement taking form across the Atlantic. Each of them absorbed different elements of this into their own thinking and practice and became some of the most influential contributors – even as students – to the European rendition of the movement. Richter's interest in current affairs, consumer society, the media and popular culture began to come through in his paintings, with early examples including Party [CR: 2-1], depicting a scene from a televised New Year's Eve party; Table [CR:1], based on a table in the Italian design magazine Domus; President Johnson consoles Mrs. Kennedy [CR: 11-2], from a newspaper cutting; and Folding Dryer [CR: 4], reproducing an advert, including text, for a clothes dryer. These works were the beginning of Richter's professional oeuvre and it was the use of photographic images – something that had previously been inconceivable to him and to academic painting – that marked the pivotal breakthrough.42 Already at this early stage, Richter set about exploring the relationship between the photographic image and painting that would become one of the cornerstones of his practice. He produced some of the first works that incorporated his "blurring" technique, such as Pedestrians [CR: 6] and Alster [CR: 10], as well as beginning a series of paintings depicting military jets, along with an increasing number of portraits, primarily in black and white, based on media images and found photographs. By the time Richter left the Academy in the summer of 1964, it was with a newly developed approach that would sustain him for decades to come. Towards the end of his studies at the Düsseldorf Academy, Richter had laid the foundations for his practice, setting up an interchange between photography and painting that was to be equally important for him as for later art-historical accounts of the Post-War period. Just before the end of term in 1964, Munich-based gallerist Heiner Friedrich invited Richter to feature in an exhibition alongside Peter Klasen. This proved to be a fruitful relationship over the next eight years, involving several exhibitions that increased Richter’s visibility outside Düsseldorf. Alfred Schmela and René Block were other important gallerists that supported Richter early on: in September 1964, Schmela gave Richter his first solo exhibition and Block featured Richter's work in a show titled Neodada, Pop, Décollage, Kapitalistischer Realismus. Richter was dissatisfied with the Capitalist Realism label that followed him from his student exhibitions but had established a good relationship with Block and so agreed to a solo exhibition in November 1964. In the same month, he was also shown alongside Lueg and Polke at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal.43 Within six months of leaving art school, Richter was exhibiting with several commercial galleries and collectors had started to show interest. While he continued to supplement his income over the next few years through various jobs, including teaching, this was a successful start to his career as an artist. Working from photographs liberated Richter from conventional painterly subjects: "Stags, aircraft, kings, secretaries. Not having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by painting – colour, composition, space – and all the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly, none of this was a prior necessity for art."44 Richter was interested in the dialectic between objectivity and subjectivity that he felt painting from photographs engendered. "When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated,"45 Richter mused in his personal writings of 1964-5. "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."46 Despite the eclecticism of Richter's early practice, he was manifestly drawn to certain subjects - affinities that were to become more apparent over the course of the coming years. Military aircraft, family portraits (of his own family and others) and groups of people were characteristic of Richter's works from this time, including The Liechti Family [CR:117], Meeting [CR: 119], and Hunting Party [CR: 121]. Images found in newspapers and magazines recurred as source material for these paintings. Robert Storr has commented on an overarching theme: "Throughout Richter's early career [...] consciousness of death is, explicitly or implicitly, the defining characteristic of numerous works. Like Warhol did in his Disaster paintings, Richter picked up on the public's horrid fascination with suffering and the media's exploitation of it."47 This became overt in works such as Dead [CR: 9], which depicts the body of a man crushed under a large block of ice, Coffin Bearers [CR: 5], and Woman with Umbrella [CR: 29], which reproduces a photograph of Jackie Kennedy crying in the street after her husband's assassination. In 1965, Richter painted Uncle Rudi [CR: 85], showing his maternal uncle who served as a Wehrmacht (German army) officer until his death in 1944. He also depicted another family member that had been lost in the war in Aunt Marianne [CR: 87], his mother’s sister who had died though the Nazi eugenics programme. It is presumably no coincidence that Richter painted Mr Heyde [CR: 100] shortly after, a psychiatrist who had been deeply involved with this programme. The themes of death and murder continued the following year in Helga Matura [CR: 124], relating to a murdered sex worker, and in Eight Student Nurses [CR: 130], the portraits of eight young women that had recently been murdered in Chicago. 1966 proved to be a significant year for Richter, with further exhibitions at Friedrich's and Block's galleries and opportunities to exhibit abroad, notably at Galleria la Tartaruga in Rome and City-Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich. He painted one of his most celebrated works, Ema (Nude on a Staircase) [CR: 134] and introduced the element of geometric abstraction to his practice through the Colour Charts [CR: 135-144]. When asked by Benjamin Buchloh in 1986 whether this departure had been influenced by the work of Blinky Palermo, Richter explained: "Yes, it certainly did have something to do with Palermo and his interests, and later with Minimal art as well; but when I painted my first colour charts in 1966, that had more to do with Pop Art. They were copies of paint sample cards [...]."48 This investigation of colour and tone continued into the 1970s and paved the way for Richter's future abstract works. The geometric element has remained a persistent influence in Richter's oeuvre, re-emerging, for example, in the design for Cologne Cathedral's stained- glass window [CR: 900], realised in 2007. Beginning with Ema (Nude on a Staircase), works featuring women, particularly nudes and erotic images, were common in Richter's work during 1967. In 1968, his attention was drawn towards aerial views of towns and cities, another route into increasingly abstract territory. Cathedral Square, Milan [CR: 169] was followed by views of Madrid, Paris and other cities, indicative of a looser, more gestural type of painting. Storr has made the connection between Richter's townscapes and pre-war and post-war Europe: "[...] They and others like them – as well as the earlier Administrative Building [CR: 39] of 1964 – are reflections on the new face of Europe and on the other surviving remnants of the old one."49 The townscapes of 1968 were joined by a substantial number of works depicting mountain ranges. This marked a new foray into landscape, another lasting genre of Richter's, signaling a desire to move away from the human figure and manmade environments.50 Between 1968 and 69 he painted several images of Corsica, where he had been on holiday with his wife Ema and first daughter Betty.51 These artworks were beginning to show Richter's growing and complicated relationship with romanticism and coincided with further explorations of abstractions, ranging from the grisaille Shadow Pictures to grey monochromes, from the Corrugated Iron series to the Colour Streak paintings.52 1968 was a year that demonstrated Richter's urge to push his practice forward, to experiment and to establish his own artistic voice. By the end of the 1960s Richter had established himself as a successful contemporary artist. There were further solo exhibitions with Block and the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, as well as his first dedicated solo exhibition in a public institution, the Gegenverkehr e.V. Zentrum für aktuelle Kunst, Aachen, in the spring of 1969. He was featured in group exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, Tokyo and New York – the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum included him in a show called 'Nine Young Artists'. Despite this success, however, Richter was feeling uncertain about the future. He had opened many potential avenues for exploration and was searching for a direction. The 1970s would begin with an extensive series of grey paintings as Richter started experimenting seriously with abstraction as a means for questioning the limits of representation. As the 1970s began, Richter's career was gathering momentum and his international reputation had started to rise. In the spring of 1970 he exhibited with Konrad Fischer, who, since their time together at the Düsseldorf Academy, had become a successful gallerist.53 Fischer's gallery was at the cutting edge of contemporary art during this time, focusing on Minimalism, Conceptualism and Formalism (exhibiting artists like Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman, Fred Sandback, On Kawara, Richard Long and Sol LeWitt). This provided Richter with a new context for painting at a time when it was considered by many to be outdated.54 Robert Storr has said that "Richter felt more at home with much of this new work than he did with that of other painters then on the rise."55 It allowed Richter to address painting outside of its traditions and to develop methods that related to the issues art was facing at the time. Questioning painting in this way was fundamental to Richter’s practice as it developed throughout the 1970s. An exhibition at the Museum Folkwang in Essen in the autumn of 1970 offered Richter the opportunity to present some of the photographs, sketches and newspaper and magazine cuttings he had amassed since the 1960s. He had slowly started organising such material earlier that year – an undertaking that was the precursor to Richter establishing his Atlas. Elger explains: "Since the late 1960s Richter had felt the need to vet and organize the mass of visual material he had accumulated and to make it presentable."56 Presented on cardboard panels and grouped in themes relating to the development of works, Atlas has since been exhibited many times – including as part of documenta X in 1997.57 It has acquired the status of an artwork in its own right and signaled a new generation of artists whose practices were not confined within one medium. In 1971, Richter returned to the geometric abstractions as first seen in the Colour Charts. This time he introduced the element of chance in the selection of colours rather than referring directly to industrial paint charts as he had done in 1966. The grids and colours became more varied, from 4 Colours [CR: 353-1], 1024 Colours [CR: 351], using as many as 4096 squares in 4096 Colours [CR: 359]. After 1974, Richter did not create any grid paintings until 2007, pursuing abstraction in other directions instead. The Grey paintings, for example, would become increasingly prominent in Richter's practice throughout the decade. They were rooted in experiments from 1967, ‘68 and ‘69, and became part of a considerable effort to push the limits of painting as a representative medium. In 1974, 31 Grey paintings were shown at the Städtisches Museum in Mönchengladbach. A few years before this breakthrough in abstraction, Richter was invited to represent Germany at the 36th Venice Biennale. This, followed by his inclusion in documenta 5, cemented his reputation as an important contemporary artist. For the Biennale Richter created 48 Portraits [CR: 324/1-48]. The series consist of 48 canvases depicting famous men from the previous two centuries, including scientists, composers, philosophers and writers. Using a reductive grey-scale, these figures are presented in close- up, using encyclopedia photographs as source material. Although similar to some earlier portraits, like Portrait Schmela [CR: 37/1-3], this impersonal portrayal of distinguished historical figures delves into the history of formal portraiture on a much grander scale. The 48 Portraits have been interpreted in many ways since their first presentation.58 48 Portraits took up a significant proportion of Richter's time in late 1971 and early 1972. Richter's output in 1972 mainly consisted of abstract works. As part of his ongoing series of Grey paintings, he started producing what he referred to as Vermalung, or Inpaintings. In general, these are works that might have started out as figurative images, but which Richter reworked or 'painted into' to such a degree that any original imagery is virtually or entirely obliterated. These paintings point to Richter's interest as a student in Art Informel. Unlike the soft and calculated blurring of his photo paintings, the Inpaintings are distinguished by gestural impasto, with the sweeping, swirling path of the brush marks clearly visible. This method could be detected in a number of earlier works: the townscapes and streak paintings of 1968-69, the Constellation paintings of 1969 and several individual pieces such as Two Women at a Table [CR: 196-2], Untitled (Grey) [CR: 194-6], Grey [CR: 247-13] and Untitled (Evening) [CR: 293-3]. The group Untitled (Green) [CR: 313-319] demonstrates the logic of the Inpaintings; based in the figuration of Park Piece [CR: 310] they move into the increasing abstraction of the brown, grey, and red-blue-yellow series of 1972. Elger has commented that "The application of paint in the grey and the red-blue-yellow Inpaintings is gestural without being expressive. Richter pulls the paint in emotionless paths over the canvas."59 For Richter, the Inpaintings were another means of removing expression as a driving force in painting. He used this erasure to draw attention to the painterly gesture – another example being the photo-enlargement paintings. Storr has aligned these with Richter's practice at the time: "Interspersed with Richter's landscapes of 1970-71, and recurring on a grand scale in 1973 and 1979, were paintings based on photo- enlargements of brushstrokes or whirling pools of mottled pigment."60 Capturing individual brush strokes of other paintings, the photo-enlargement paintings zoomed in on the very act of painting as a vehicle for miming abstraction. The Colour Charts, Grey paintings, Inpaintings and photo-enlargements represent Richter's growing commitment to abstraction as a counter-model to figurative painting.61 Alongside his American peers, including Elsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly, Richter was working to come to terms with the possibilities offered by abstraction and minimalism. As Storr explains: "From 1968 through 1976 the monochrome preoccupied him, but by the latter part of the decade it became apparent to him that there was no way he could paint himself out of the grey corner he had been led into by the example of minimalism and his own anti-expressive inclinations."62 The 1970s were not the happiest years in Richter's private life, with his marriage to Ema becoming increasingly strained and gradually coming to an end. This was reflected in his work, as demonstrated by the bleak monochromes and grisaille Inpaintings. Figurative work such as the 1975 series entitled Seascape [CR: 375-378], depicting a desolate arctic sea, also carries a melancholy, inspired by Caspar David Friedrich's The Wreck of Hope.63 Described by Elger as an "artistic cul-de-sac,"64 the point that Richter had reached by 1976 seemed like a dead end Richter's unhappiness was compounded by the unexpected and premature death of his friend Blinky Palermo during a holiday on Kurumba Island in the Maldives. 1977 saw a breakthrough in two directions. Richter created two sculptural pieces made of panes of glass painted in grey: Pane of Glass [CR: 415/1-2] and Double Pane of Glass [CR: 416]. The grey surface was altered through the intervention of glass, or more specifically, reflection, something Richter would explore further in the 1990s and early 2000s. There was also the development of a substantial number of colourful abstract works described simply as Abstraktes Bild [Abstract Painting]. Gone – at least for a while – were the greys and browns, substituted with bold and bright colours in different patterns, textures, surfaces and techniques. These offered an energetic investigation into optics and perception, planes, depth, space, shape, form, colour and light. It was to be a significant phase of his practice that continued well into the early 1980s and laid the foundations for future bodies of work including Sinbad [CR: 905/1-100], 2008, and Aladdin [CR: 913 and 915], 2010. In the spring of 1979, Richter and Ema formally separated. But the end of a difficult decade also marked the start of a new chapter. A decade that began with grey could not have ended with more colour. The struggle to map out and come to terms with the possibilities of abstraction was paying off. In the early 1980s, painting was reaffirming its status in the art world, with neo- expressionism (or Neue Wilde as it was sometimes referred to in Germany) heading its revival. In the US, figures such as Philip Guston and Julian Schnabel were leading practitioners, and in Germany Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer had risen to fame. In early 1981, an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London entitled A New Spirit in Painting brought many of these artists together - including Richter. Robert Storr has described Richter as a forerunner to these changes: "Richter's engagement with expressionist-type painting antedates this movement by several years, but he was doubtless aware of this current as it began to well up around him and as he was lumped together with its exponents in a number of exhibitions as the tendency crested."65 The exhibition nonetheless brought Richter to a wider audience. Alongside German Art Today at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and a solo show in Munich, the decade started well. Towards the end of the 1970s, Richter had found a new direction with his Abstract Paintings. His personal life had also undergone changes: he had divorced his wife Ema and began a close relationship with artist Isa Genzken. They first met in the early 1970s when she was a student and Richter became reacquainted later in the decade when she was established as a successful artist. By the early 1980s, Genzken and Richter were living together in Düsseldorf, and they married in 1982. The following year they were offered a large studio space in a former factory in Bismarckstrasse in Cologne by Richter's gallerist Rudolf Zwirner, which they accepted, leaving Düsseldorf and Richter's studio in Brückenstrasse behind. The main question facing Richter after the success with his abstractions was in what direction to take his figurative work. Between 1982 and 1983 Richter created a series of work depicting candles. Although they received little attention when first exhibited in Germany, they have come to be regarded as some of Richter's most iconic works. Painted with a muted but complex palette ranging from earthy browns and coppers through dusty greys, shadowy blues, dim greens and musty beiges, the candles – often a single candle, though occasionally two or three per image – are depicted against minimal backgrounds comprising bare walls, plain tabletops and dark doorways. Using chiaroscuro and blurring, the Candle paintings offered a fresh approach to photo painting that also served to distinguish him from the neo-expressionist fashions of the time. Landscapes also confirmed their position in Richter's oeuvre in the 1980s. Ever since his Corsica paintings [CR: 199-201, 211, 212] of the late 1960s, Richter had periodically returned to the subject, each time integrating it further with his core themes. While the Davos paintings [CR: 468/1-3, 469-1] of 1981 and the Iceberg paintings [CR: 496/1-2] of 1982 had extended Richter's interest in the sublime and German romanticism, landscape paintings of 1983 and 84 were more down to earth, depicting rural farmland areas. In works such as Barn [CR: 549-1], Meadow [CR: 549-2] and Rhinescape [CR: 550-3] it is the Rhineland, close to Richter's home, which is presented. The Abstract Paintings [CR 551/1-9] that follow on from these landscapes in 1984 show how closely aligned Richter's figurative and abstract work really was, with blue skies and horizons serving to anchor otherwise entirely abstract marks. In 1985, Richter produced a number of landscapes including Staubach [CR: 572-1], Troisdorf [CR: 572-2] and Buschdorf [CR:572-5] that were more subdued and set the tone for his future landscapes, which Dietmar Elger observes "culminated in 1987 with twenty-three field and meadow pieces."66 In 1988, Richter made a series of photo paintings in a starkly different direction. October 18, 1977 [CR: 667-674], a cycle of paintings relating to the day several members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) - also known as the Baader-Meinhof group - died in prison, was to be one of Richter's most significant and discussed bodies of work. The RAF was a group that Storr has described as "student radicals turned armed revolutionaries"67 who carried out a range of terrorist acts in the 1970s. Their deaths were treated as suicides, though their unusual circumstances raised suspicions that they might have been killed by agents of the state. Richter's series of blurred, grisaille paintings depicted key moments from the events leading up to and surrounding their deaths, including the arrest of three members of the group on the morning of 1st June 1972, member Gudrun Ensslin hanging in her cell on October 18, 1977, and the funeral following their deaths on October 27, 1977. This was Richter's most politically provocative body of work to date, and even though the work was made more than ten years after the events, it was still a subject that touched a raw nerve with the German public, opening up the debate about a "disaffected generation, a generation for the most part born after the war and at odds with that of their parents who had acquiesced to, if not supported, Hitler."68 Richter's works seemed to crystallise this debate, although he resisted commenting on it himself.69 Speaking about the RAF in 1989, Richter asserted that what he found most inexplicable was how humans "produce ideas, which are almost always not only utterly wrong and nonsensical but above all dangerous."70 Another work produced in 1988 proved to be one of Richter's most popular works of all time and could not have been more different to the October cycle. Betty [CR: 663-5] is a portrait of Richter's daughter Betty as a young girl (by the time of painting she was a young adult). She sits close to the picture plane, wearing a red and white floral hooded cardigan or dressing gown, facing away from the viewer, seemingly into a dark grey void – a void which on closer inspection reveals itself as one of Richter's grey abstract canvases. Such work helped launch Richter into the public sphere beyond the art market and gallery sector. By the end of the 1980s, Richter was among the most prominent painters in both Germany and the world. His first major retrospective, which started in 1986 at the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and travelled to Berlin, Bern and Vienna, was greeted with critical acclaim. His gallery representation was shifting too, with Marian Goodman in New York and Anthony d'Offay in London taking the lead as Richter's representation. The 1980s had been a highly successful decade, seeing both his abstract works and photo paintings reach a point of acclaim that matched his status and reputation. As the 1990s began, Richter was busy with Abstract Paintings, which he devoted his time to almost exclusively for the first year. After a hectic couple of years with both production and exhibitions, Richter needed some time to settle down in the studio and he postponed several exhibitions to which he had been committed. In 1991, he returned to the medium of mirrors, which he had first explored a decade earlier in four pieces [CR: 470/1-2, 485/1-2]. In 1989 Richter had the chance to work with glass and colour for a private commission [Stained-Glass Window, 625 Colours, [703]]. The combination offered a fertile terrain for Richter, and 1991 saw him complete an array of works that drew on this dormant interest in minimalist abstraction. According to the official catalogue raisonné of Richter’s work, three rectangular works entitled Mirror, Grey [CR: 735/1-3] were produced first, using glass coated with grey pigment. The grey works were immediately followed by eight works entitled Mirror, Blood Red [CR: 736/1-8] and then by two pairs with complementary colour schemes, Corner Mirror, Brown-Blue [CR: 737-1] and Corner Mirror, Green-Red [CR: 737-2]. Almost 20 more grey mirrors then followed before the end of 1992. His Abstract Paintings also leant toward the more structured and minimalist end of abstraction. Stripes and grids dominated. The close resemblance of these abstractions suggested that Richter was experimenting but looking for something specific, following a route of "painterly research."71 Several Abstract Paintings of 1987 [CR: 621, 643/1-5] had sown the seeds for what Richter was striving for in 1992, working with horizontal and vertical striations to counteract the depth and flatness of the picture plane. The challenge equally seemed to involve unifying bright colours with the more muted, melancholy palette to which Richter was periodically drawn. It was a subject he had addressed back in 1972 with his Red-Blue-Yellow works [CR: 327-339] in which he had investigated the processes and stages of the muddying of primary colours through the mixing of paint. Returning to this theme 20 years later, Richter's first significant works to synthesise these elements was a cycle of four paintings titled Bach [CR: 785-788], 1992. Each canvas measures three by three metres and while he had worked on even larger canvases in the past, these were in many ways the new benchmark for Richter's Abstract Paintings, paving the way for future cycles - in particular the Cage paintings [CR: 897/1-6] of 2006, alongside which they were displayed at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2008. In 1993, Richter created a series of paintings of his wife, Isa Genzken, in which she poses with her back to the artist [CR: 790/1-5]. Some commentators have suggested that the tone of the paintings is one of detachment. Shortly after, the couple separated. A year later, Richter met the artist Sabine Moritz and they soon got married. A comparable series of paintings of Sabine shows her facing the viewer. With a warm tone comparable to his painting Betty from 1988, Reader [CR: 799-1, 804] depicts her in profile, illuminated from behind, reading a magazine. A series of eight paintings from 1995 of Sabine with newborn son Moritz [CR: 827/1-8] are among the most intimate and personal of Richter's oeuvre, described by Robert Storr as having "an almost palpable tenderness"72 and by Dietmar Elger as depicting "domestic bliss."73 With daughter Ella Maria born a year after Moritz, in the summer of 1996 the family moved into their newly built home in Hahnwald, south of Cologne. Richter continued primarily producing abstract works in the 1990s, only occasionally interspersing them with a photo painting. Speaking about this in 1999, Richter commented, "I love figurative painting and find it very interesting. I've not done a lot of figurative work because I lack subjects. Abstract is something everyday for me, as natural as walking or breathing."74 The photo paintings produced continued to show personal and intimate subjects, including [Hahnwald, CR: 840-1], Orchid [CR: 848-9], Seascape [CR: 852-1], and Summer Day [CR: 859-1]. Richter's output during this time was lower than usual due to the artist having suffered a stroke in late summer of 1998, from which he made a swift recovery. Another genre in Richter's oeuvre which would grow to become more noticeable in the 1990s was the Overpainted Photographs, which he had been working on since c.1986. Currently, Sils-Maria from 1987 counts as the earliest Overpainted Photograph. Since the mid 1980s, Richter has produced over 2,000 Overpainted Photographs, including the edition Firenze (2000), which consists of almost 120 works – or Museum Visit (2011) comprising 234 works. These works offer another way for Richter to negotiate the languages of figuration, abstraction and the photograph, often with considerable impact and striking effect. Towards the end of the millennium, Richter received an important commission from the German government. Richter and Sigmar Polke were invited to create works for the entrance hall of the Reichstag building in Berlin. Elger's account documents Richter's original hope to address the subject of the Holocaust with this commission, but the artist eventually decided on something more apolitical, opting to make a work based on the German national colours black, red and gold. Ultimately, Black, Red and Gold [CR: 856] took the form of six large, thin rectangular glass panels, coloured with black, red and gold enamel; two panels per colour – the German flag in the format of a long vertical strip. The combined length of the panels came to over 20 metres. Richter had envisaged monumental works for a long time, evident from drawings in the Atlas, and so this commission would see a new aspect realised - alongside the canonisation of Richter as a national artist. "Well, after this century of grand proclamations and terrible illusions, I hope for an era in which real and tangible accomplishments, and not grand proclamations, are the only things that count."75 At the turn of the century, Richter remained focused on his Abstract Paintings - three paintings of his young son Moritz being the most notable exception [CR: 863/1-3]. Eight Grey [CR: 874/1-8] of 2001 heralded a number of works that continued the experimentation with glass. Works such as Pane of Glass [CR: 876-1], 4 Standing Panes [CR: 877-1] and 7 Standing Panes [CR: 879-1] demonstrated an interest in pushing wall-based works into the realm of the sculptural. Themes that the artist had worked with for a long time - transparency, translucency, opacity and reflection - took centre stage. In 2002, MoMA in New York held a major retrospective of Richter's work, titled Forty Years of Painting. Curated by Robert Storr, the exhibition featured 190 works and was one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of Richter's oeuvre to date. It was also the exhibition that confirmed his status as one of the leading artists in the world. His introduction to the United States was described by Storr as "long overdue"76 in the catalogue. Richter continued to draw inspiration from current events, as he had done in the 1960s. A series of large paintings titled Silicate [CR: 885/1-4] were inspired by an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 12 March 2003 about new possibilities of microscopic vision. These paintings are the most biomorphic of the abstract works in Richter's oeuvre, depicting cell formations and genetic sequences as seen under the microscope.77 A more overt political reference was to be seen in the work September [CR: 891-5] from 2005, in many ways a stylistic departure at the time, which depicted the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001. In a 2010 publication about the painting Storr wrote: "What is the meaning of a single, small, almost abstract depiction of one of the most consequential occurrences in recent world history?"78 The painting shows the two towers against a blue sky, but the point of the impact has been erased by gestures akin of those in the Inpaintings. Through this act of withdrawal, the enormity and significance of the event is shared with viewers through their knowledge of it, much like with the October 18, 1977 cycle. September was described by critic Bryan Appleyard of The Sunday Times as "the closest you will get to a great 9/11 work,"79 because "it reclaim[ed] the day, leaving it exactly where it was, exactly when it happened."80 2006 saw the creation of a dedicated cycle of Abstract Paintings entitled Cage [CR: 897/1- 6]. These six large-scale canvases, described by Nicholas Serota as "magisterial,"81 were named after the American avant-garde composer John Cage, whose work Richter felt had a deep resonance with his own. In a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Richter said that he had been listening to the music of Cage whilst working in his studio at the time. To Jan Thorn-Prikker he stated: "That's roughly how Cage put it: 'I have nothing to say and I am saying it.' I have always thought that was a wonderful quote. It's the best chance we have to be able to keep on going."82 The concluding line in Storr's 2009 publication devoted to the series, Cage – Six Paintings by Gerhard Richter, references the Cage quote, stating: "In his own idiom, and for his own reasons, [the Cage paintings] are Richter's beautiful way of saying nothing, and as such, of once more declaring his uncompromising independence."83 In 2008 the Cage paintings were shown alongside the Bach paintings at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, after which they were acquired by Tate Modern, London where they are on permanent display. In 2007, Richter completed another commission - a large stained-glass window for Cologne Cathedral to replace one that had been destroyed during the Second World War. He had been invited to undertake the commission back in 2002 and devoted considerable time to the project during the five years. In notes prepared for a conference in July 2006, Richter wrote: “In early 2002, the master builder of the cathedral suggested that I develop a glass design for the southern window. The guiding principle was the representation of six martyrs, in keeping with the period. I was, of course, very touched to have such an honour bestowed upon me, but I soon realised I wasn't at all qualified for the task. After several unsuccessful attempts to get to grips with the subject, and prepared to finally concede failure, I happened upon a large representation of my painting with 4096 colours. I put the template for the design of the window over it and saw that this was the only possibility.”84 In Richter's design, 11,000 mouth-blown squares, each measuring 94 x 94 mm, were used, with half of these selected randomly by a computer programme and the other half mirroring the first. As well as an evolution of his Colour Charts from the 1960s and 70s, the Cologne Cathedral Window [CR: 900] was also informed by Glass Window, 625 Colours [CR: 703] of 1989. The process of working with the design for the Cathedral has been documented extensively in a film by Corinna Belz released in 2007.85 In 2008, Richter embarked on a significant body of colourful abstract work entitled Sinbad [CR: 905]. Consisting of 100 small paintings in enamel on the back of glass, Sinbad is the first series of works by Richter to allude to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). Sinbad was followed in 2010 by Aladdin [CR: 913, 915]. That the artist was clearly thinking a lot about the Middle East is illustrated by the related series Baghdad [CR: 914], 2010 and Abdallah [CR: 917], 2010. As his Abstract Paintings of the 2000s had grown more sombre, these works picked up the brighter palettes that Richter had engaged in the abstract works of the late 1970s and early 80s. The first decade in the new millennium also saw Richter use digital technology in his practice. In the works entitled Strip [CR: 920-921] from 2011, digital prints mounted between aluminium and acrylic glass, with long horizontal stripes of varying thickness, span a length of 3 meters. The colour of each stripe is based on a digital manipulation of an earlier Abstract Painting, creating another layer to Richter's experimentation with the painterly gesture, photography, and representation, akin to that of the photo-enlargement paintings of the 1970s. The 2010s has been a decade of consolidation for Richter. Successful retrospectives and exhibitions have been curated across the globe, including Gerhard Richter: Panorama in London, Berlin and Paris; Gerhard Richter: Survey in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico; and Gerhard Richter: Painting 1992-2017 in Tokyo – alongside exhibitions dedicated to his Atlas, Overpainted Photographs and editions. Being considered one of the most influential living artists of our time, he increasingly participates in the art world dialogue, discussing topics like the future and purpose of art. Turning 80 in 2012 has done little to slow down Richter's productivity, and he continues to take his practice in new directions. https:// www.gerhard-richter.com/en/ biography](https://pub-5dcee866566b4f4b8f0ec1c588394465.r2.dev/federated/internet-archive/1445611955Sxvefixmhsv50dybnifo_201903_thumb.jpg)
