Gerhard Richter – the Famous German Artist
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 to a middle class family. He left school after tenth grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Art Academy. Gerhard Richter taught as a visiting professor in Hamburg and in 1971 became tenured professor at Dusseldorf Art Academy.
Gerhard Richter began to work with artists such as Sigmar Polke, Konrad Fischer-Lueg and Georg Baselitz. Their work, and Richter’s in particular, began to have an impact in Germany, and eventually to international art circles. Together with Polke and Fischer-Lueg, Richter formed a group called the Capitalist Realists. The Capitalist Realists were satirical, often deriving subject matter from print media. Richter began to see art as something that had to be separated from art history. He wanted to find a new way of painting that would not be constricting.Richter emerged from the group to become one of the most sought after contemporary artists in the world. His work is regularly sold at auction, sometimes for millions.
Exhibitions and prizes
Personal life
Gerhard Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957. Nine years later, she gave birth to his first daughter Betty. He married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken in 1982 . Richter had his son, Moritz, with his third wife Sabine Moritz the year they were married, 1995. One year later, his second daughter, Ella Maria, was born.
Art tendencies
Gerhard Richter’s work is full of tension between depicted reality and the actuality of painting: process and material. Richter’s paintings consistently support a unified theme that is twofold:
1. Images (and ideas and ideals) are static, superficial, and unachievable.
2. Reality is a process of imagination and material creation and revision. Richter’s subject is the range of relationships between illusion and this reality, his painting.
Gerhard Richter is considered by some critics as one of the most important German artists of the post-World War II period and is also one of the world’s most expensive, with his paintings often selling for several million dollars apiece.
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