Atelier (Studio)
Signed Print

Speaking to Richter’s love of photography, this print should be digested alongside the photorealistic ‘blur’ paintings completed by the artist during the late 1960s and early 70s. Although conceptually dissimilar to such contemporaneous works as the world-famous 48 Portraits series (1972), or the ghostly Mao (1968), Atelier (Studio) references the genesis of Richter’s interest in blurring images so as to render them ‘technological’ and ‘almost perfect’ in appearance. Recalling the kind of static, nocturnal image captured by a modern-day CCTV camera, the print hones in on the fuzzy, monochromatic outline of Richter’s first studio in the West German city of Düsseldorf.

In 1961, at the age of just 29, Richter escaped East Germany for the West. Making this bold move just months prior to the building of the Berlin Wall - a physical barrier that would have likely obstructed him in his desire to reach artistic and personal freedom - Richter later settled in Düsseldorf. A wealthy and bureaucratic city, Düsseldorf differed greatly from Richter’s birthplace, Dresden - a city still racked by the vestiges of allied bombardment during World War Two and firmly under the control of the ruling SED party, a puppet of the Soviet Union. At the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Richter co-founded the Capitalist Realism art movement, parodying the consumer-driven culture of his new surroundings as well as his strict socialist realist training, which he received back in Dresden.