Gerhard Richter

German, b. 1932. Gerhard Richter is a seminal visual artist, photographer, and painter well-known for his photorealistic and abstract paintings, glass pieces, and photographs. He is an influential contemporary German painter. Gerhard Richter artwork at auction often garners record-breaking prices. The artist's experiments with photo-based paintings and abstraction made notable contributions to the medium's history. Ritcher's artworks often make use of images from his photograph collection Atlas as a reference. He also refers to photographs of his daughter, flickering candles, criminal portraits, pastoral landscapes, and aerial images.

Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden in Germany. While living in East Germany after WWII, Richter started painting Socialist Realist murals. The artist in 1961 fled to West Germany and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with fellow artist Sigmar Polke. It was during this time that Richter started creating his signature blurry photo-paintings. The photo-paintings explore the contradictory nature of the formal image content. He added abstraction to his collections in the coming decades. He also analyzed the painterly character with the technique of adding paint to canvas by squeezing it. Gerhard Richter also set a record in 2012 by selling his 1994 artwork Abstraktes Bild (809-4) for $34 million. It was the highest-price sold painting of a living artist. He also broke this record twice after 2012. In 2013, his 1968 painting Domplatz, Mailand (1968) (Cathedral square, Milan) garnered $37.1 million, and Abstraktes Bild (1986) sold in 2015 garnered $44.52 million.

Today, the artist resides in Cologne in Germany. His artworks are on display in notable museums and art centers like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, the Albertina in Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Collectors can also find Gerhard Richter Artwork for sale in leading art galleries. Gerhard Richter artwork at auction is often available at an online auction by well-known galleries.

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