Gerhard Richter Art for Sale: Prints & Originals

Gerhard
Richter

Gerhard Richter challenges painting conventions, producing a diverse artistic output, from abstraction to photorealism and photography. If you’re looking for original Gerhard Richter prints and editions for sale or would like to sell, request a complimentary valuation and browse our network’s most in-demand works.

Biography

Unrestrained by any one visual style, German artist Gerhard Richter’s art spans abstraction to photorealism, glasswork to photography. Richter’s eclectic work is rich in varied media, from his famous reproductions of both banal and historic photography to his sheer panes of glass and church windows.

Born in 1932 in Dresden, Richter’s upbringing was shaped by the war and death that surrounded him. Though originally trained in the strict Socialist-Realist style, it is perhaps unsurprising that he would go on to produce work that advocates for the death of painting.

After the war, Richter was based in East Germany, where he studied mural painting at the Dresden Art Academy from 1951. Later, after a spell in Moscow, he decided to defect to West Germany, where he made a living building carnival floats and painting theatre sets, before studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. It was here that he began his art career in earnest.

After some initial disappointments, Richter’s career began to take off in the mid-1960s and 1970s, when he started using photographs from magazines and newspapers to inspire his paintings. These works that established him as a notable artist and led to exhibitions across Germany in 1964 and 1965. Moving into the 21st century, Richter became increasingly focused on abstraction, transparency, narrative, and a return to the bold colours of his early career. He revisited the medium of glass to blur the lines between wall-based art and sculpture, in series such as Eight Grey, works such as Pane of Glass (2002), and in commissioned stained-glass windows.

In 2005, Richter released a painting based on a photograph of the attacks on the World Trade Center of 11th September 2001. He deliberately erased the point of impact and left it up to the viewer’s knowledge to fill in the narrative. This idea of narrative is key to all of his later abstract works; Richter’s paintings give an indication of the story, and the reader creates the rest.

To this day, Richter is one of the most recognised artists of the 20th century. Richter’s art has been presented in exhibitions all over the world. In 1993-94, the first retrospective of Richter’s work travelled through Bonn, Stockholm, Madrid, and Paris; and, in 2002, to mark the 70th anniversary of Richter’s career, a second was held at the MoMA in New York. Since 2010, many more exhibitions have been held at prestigious galleries across the globe, including Wako Works of Art in Tokyo, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and The Drawing Center in New York.

The first catalogued work by Richter was a piece entitled Table (1962); he destroyed most of the paintings he had produced before this time in a fire outside the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The fire was prompted by the result of Richter’s first exhibition, which took place in Fulda, outside Frankfurt, in September 1962. He was asked to fill a gap in the program left by a postponed show; and though he sold nothing, his work was met with controversial criticism, which motivated Richter to burn all of his work and start afresh with renewed enthusiasm. As a result, little is known about these formative years, except that they featured a blend of figurative and abstract styles, taking the form of portraits of his wife and a series of abstract works he called ‘spots.’
It was after this fire that Richter began using photographs from magazines and newspapers to inspire his paintings. It was these works that established him as a notable artist and led to exhibitions across Germany in 1964 and 1965.
One of Richter’s most famous earlier works is Ema (nude on a staircase), painted in 1966, which demonstrates both Richter’s figurative interests and the use of photography in creating his prints.
As Richter took many of his photographs from newspapers at the time, the events and aftermath of the war were heavy themes in his work. The most notable example of this is his series of paintings of the Bader-Meinhof terrorist group. Entitled October 18 1977, the group of 15 works was based on images of the Red Army Faction, who targeted American Army bases and were anti-heroes for many young Germans. The series reframes the crime-ridden lives of the Faction members by blurring the images and retracting any descriptions. Richter asks the viewer to form their own judgement on these and other well-known images by totally removing their context and leaving only a hint of the well-known, historical moment behind.
In 1959, Richter saw the works of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana at Documenta II in Kassel. Seeing these abstract works helped him come to terms with the censorship that restricted art in East Germany to strictly traditional, figurative works. He soon fled to West Germany, determined to pursue his own preferred abstract style. Richter’s education at the Düsseldorf Art Academy formed much of his artistic influence. The curriculum was rich in the abstraction of Art Informel and the ground-breaking, media-challenging Fluxus movement. It was notably the work of John Cage, particularly known for his notation work and experimentation with Fluxus, who influenced Richter’s approach of planning compositions through a combination of planned structure and chance procedures.
By defecting to West Germany in 1961, Richter had committed the crime of ‘flight from the Republic,’ and all his remaining possessions in Dresden were seized by the authorities, including 38 paintings. Despite the trauma of fleeing his hometown, Richter claims never to have regretted his decision to move, as the culture of the West better suited his way of life and his abstract work - in the West, they boldly accepted the more challenging works of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana.
Since then, Richter’s work has made him one of the most influential living artists in the world, a position that he uses to regularly discuss the future and purpose of art, and which has afforded him countless prestigious exhibitions in recent decades.

In 2012, Abstraktes Bild (809-4) set a new record price for a living artist at auction. A record that Richter then went on to break in 2013, and once again in 2015. The piece was formerly part of Eric Clapton’s art collection, which added to the prestige of an already sought-after example of Richter’s intense and colourful, abstract works.

An anonymous bidder purchased the piece for almost double its high estimate, demonstrating Richter’s enduring international appeal. The artwork is quintessential of Richter’s Abstraktes Bild series, exemplifying the scale of these works as well as the artist’s unique focus on making his technique of using wooden boards, a homemade squeegee, and oil paints, clear on the canvas itself.

This oil on canvas has since been resold in the 21st Century Art Evening Sale on 10 May 2022 in Christie's, New York, for a staggering £29.6million.