Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist whose work ranges from paintings based on photographs to abstract compositions. His practice repeatedly tests how images represent, blur, and conceal reality.

Aunt Marianne: A 1965 painting by Richter based on a family photograph of his aunt Marianne and infant cousin. It turns a family snapshot into a portrait shadowed by Nazi-era history.
Photo painting: A painting made by translating a photograph into paint while retaining photographic framing or appearance. Richter uses this approach to make painted images seem both precise and unstable.
Dresden: A German city where Richter was born and began studying art. His early life and art education were rooted in Dresden before he left East Germany.
Sigmar Polke: A German painter who helped develop Capitalist Realism with Richter in the 1960s. Their shared experiments made mass-media imagery a point of departure for painting.
Contemporary art: Art produced in the present era, generally associated with practices emerging after the mid-twentieth century. Richter’s varied practice became a major reference point within postwar art.
Ema (Nude on a Staircase): A 1966 painting of Richter’s wife Ema descending a staircase, based on a photograph. Its blurred photographic image reworks Marcel Duchamp’s famous staircase nude.
Squeegee painting: A painting technique that drags a broad blade across wet paint, spreading or scraping colour. Richter’s squeegee strokes disrupt underlying layers and produce partly uncontrolled compositions.
East Germany: A socialist state that existed from 1949 to 1990 in the eastern part of Germany. Richter’s early career unfolded under its official artistic institutions and restrictions.
Konrad Lueg: A German painter and art dealer, born Konrad Fischer, who co-founded Capitalist Realism with Richter and Polke. He joined Richter and Polke in staging early actions that satirized consumer culture.
Appropriation art: Art that reuses existing images, objects, or styles to create new meanings. His paintings of photographs make the act of borrowing images central to painting.

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