Photo-paintings and the "blur" , in 2023 Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on a variety of sources: newspapers and books, sometimes incorporating their captions, (as in
Helga Matura (1966)); private snapshots; aerial views of towns and mountains, (
Cityscape Madrid (1968) and Alps (1968)); seascapes (1969–70); and a large multipart work made for the German Pavilion in the 1972
Venice Biennale. For
Forty-eight Portraits (1971–72), he chose mainly the faces of composers such as
Gustav Mahler and
Jean Sibelius, and of writers such as
H. G. Wells and
Franz Kafka. From around 1964, Richter made a number of portraits of dealers, collectors, artists, and others connected with his immediate professional circle. Richter's two portraits of
Betty, his daughter, were made in 1977 and 1988 respectively; the three portraits titled
IG were made in 1993 and depict the artist's second wife,
Isa Genzken.
Lesende (1994) portrays
Sabine Moritz, whom Richter married in 1995, shown absorbed in the pages of a magazine. Many of his realist paintings reflect on the history of Nazism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims, of the Nazi party. From 1966, as well as those given to him by others, Richter began using photographs he had taken as the basis for portraits. Richter began making prints in 1965. He was most active before 1974, only completing sporadic projects since that time. In the period 1965–1974, Richter made most of his prints (more than 100), of the same or similar subjects in his paintings. He has explored a variety of photographic printmaking processes –
screenprint,
photolithography, and
collotype – in search of inexpensive mediums that would lend a "non-art" appearance to his work. He stopped working in print media in 1974, and began painting from photographs he took himself. Landscapes have since emerged as an independent work group in his oeuvre. According to Dietmar Elger, Richter's landscapes are understood within the context of traditional German Romantic Painting. They are compared to the work of
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Friedrich is foundational to German landscape painting. Each artist spent formative years of their lives in
Dresden.
Große Teyde-Landschaft (1971) takes its imagery from similar holiday snapshots of the volcanic regions of
Tenerife.
Atlas was first exhibited in 1972 at the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title
Atlas der Fotos und Skizzen. It included 315 parts. The work has continued to expand, and was exhibited later in full form at the
Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1989, the
Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1990, and at
Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1995.
Atlas continues as an ongoing, encyclopedic work composed of approximately 4,000 photographs, reproductions or cut-out details of photographs and illustrations, grouped together on approximately 600 separate panels. In 1972, Richter embarked on a ten-day trip to
Greenland. His friend
Hanne Darboven was meant to accompany him, but instead, he traveled alone. His intention was to experience and record the desolate arctic landscape. In 1976, four large paintings, each titled
Seascape, emerged from the Greenland photographs. In 1982 and 1983, Richter made a series of paintings of
Candles and
Skulls that relate to a longstanding tradition of still life
memento mori painting. Each composition is most commonly based on a photograph taken by Richter in his own studio. Influenced by old master vanitas painters such as
Georges de La Tour and
Francisco de Zurbarán, the artist began to experiment with arrangements of candles and skulls placed in varying degrees of natural light, sitting atop otherwise barren tables. The Candle paintings coincided with his first large-scale abstract paintings, and represent the complete antithesis to those vast, colorful and playfully meaningless works. Richter has made only 27 of these still lifes. In 1995, the artist marked the 50th anniversary of the allied bombings of his hometown Dresden during the Second World War. His solitary candle was reproduced on a monumental scale and placed overlooking the River Elbe as a symbol of rejuvenation. Richter has said that while painting this series, “I did experience feelings to do with contemplation, remembering, silence, and death.” In a 1988 series of 15 ambiguous photo paintings entitled
18 October 1977, he depicted four members of the
Red Army Faction (RAF), a German left-wing militant organization. These paintings were created from black-and-white newspaper and police photos. Three RAF members were found dead in their prison cells on 18 October 1977 and the cause of their deaths was the focus of widespread controversy. In the late 1980s, Richter had begun to collect images of the group which he used as the basis for the 15 paintings exhibited for the first time in Krefeld in 1989. The paintings were based on an official portrait of
Ulrike Meinhof during her years as a radical journalist; on photographs of the arrest of
Holger Meins; on police shots of
Gudrun Ensslin in prison; on
Andreas Baader's bookshelves and the record player to conceal his gun; on the dead figures of Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader; and on the funeral of Ensslin, Baader, and
Jan-Carl Raspe. Since 1989, Richter has worked on creating new images by dragging wet paint over photographs. The photographs, not all taken by Richter himself, are mostly snapshots of daily life: family vacations, pictures of friends, mountains, buildings, and streetscapes. Richter was flying to New York on 11 September 2001, but due to the
9/11 attacks, including on the
World Trade Center, his plane was diverted to
Halifax, Nova Scotia. A few years later, he made one small painting specifically about the planes crashing into the
World Trade Center. In
September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter,
Robert Storr situates Richter's 2005 painting
September within a brand of anti-ideological thought that he finds throughout Richter's work. He considers how the ubiquitous photographic documentation of 11 September attacks affects the uniqueness of one's distinct remembrance of the events, and he offers a valuable comparison to Richter's
18 October 1977 cycle. In the 2000s, Richter made a number of works that dealt with scientific phenomena. In 2003, he produced several paintings with the same title:
Silicate. Large oil-on-canvas pieces, these show latticed rows of light- and dark-grey blobs whose shapes quasi-repeat as they race across the frame, their angle modulating from painting to painting. They depict a photo, published in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, of a computer-generated simulacrum of reflections from the silicon dioxide found in insects' shells. In 2014, Richter created a cycle of four paintings using the
Sonderkommando photographs, which were taken in the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the
Holocaust, titled
Birkenau. In October 2021, Gerhard Richter decided to make his
Birkenau images permanently available to the
International Auschwitz Committee. Currently, the cycle is on permanent display in an exhibition pavilion on the grounds of the
International Youth Meeting Center in Oświęcim/Auschwitz, around 2 kilometers from the
Auschwitz II-Birkenau site. The pavilion was built according to a design by the artist. In 2024, an edition of the works as prints on metal plate, made and donated by Richter, went on display at the Centre.
Abstract work Richter's early work
Table (1962) consisted of a painting of a table, taken from a photograph in a magazine, with
tachiste gestural marks overlapping. Those marks can be read as cancelling the photorealist representation, using haptic swirls of grey paint, as well as a form of
generativity. In 1969, Richter produced the first of a group of grey
monochromes that consist exclusively of the textures resulting from different methods of paint application. In 1976, Richter first gave the title
Abstract Painting to one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few words to name and explain it, he felt he was "letting a thing come, rather than creating it." In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of non-representational painting, beginning with brushing big swaths of primary color onto canvas. The paintings evolve in stages, based on his responses to the picture's progress: the incidental details and patterns that emerge. Throughout his process, Richter uses the same techniques he uses in his representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers. From the mid-1980s, Richter began to use a homemade
squeegee to rub and scrape the paint that he had applied in large bands across his canvases.
Firenze consists of small paintings bearing images of the city of Florence, created by the artist as a tribute to the music of
Steve Reich and the work of Contempoartensemble, a Florence-based group of musicians. After 2000, Richter made a number of works that dealt with scientific phenomena, in particular, with aspects of reality that cannot be seen by the naked eye. In 2006, Richter conceived six paintings as a coherent group under the title
Cage, named after the American avant-garde composer
John Cage. The
Cage paintings are large works constructed from intersecting fields, lines, and swaths of uneven smears that reflect the broad squeegee tool which Richter drags across the canvases, before removing areas of paint to generate a subtractive method of concealing and revealing variegated layers and patches. In May 2002, Richter photographed 216 details of his abstract painting no. 648-2, from 1987. Working on a long table over a period of several weeks, Richter combined these 10 x 15 cm details with 165 texts on the Iraq war, published in the German
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on 20 and 21 March. This work was published in 2004 as a book entitled
War Cut. In November 2008, Richter began a series in which he applied ink droplets to wet paper, using alcohol and lacquer to extend and retard the ink's natural tendency to bloom and creep. The resulting
November sheets are regarded as a significant departure from his previous watercolours in that the pervasive soaking of ink into wet paper produced double-sided works. Sometimes, the uppermost sheets bled into others, generating a sequentially developing series of images. In a few cases, Richter applied lacquer to one side of the sheet, or drew pencil lines across the patches of colour.
Color chart paintings As early as 1966, Richter had made paintings based on colour charts. For these works, he drew inspirations from using the charts as found objects, which arranged rectangles of colors in an apparently limitless variety of hues. Richter's experiments culminated in 1973-74 in a series of large-format pictures, such as
256 Colours. The artist began his investigations into the complex permutations of color charts in 1966, with a small painting entitled
10 Colors. The charts provided anonymous and impersonal source material, a way for Richter to disassociate color from any traditional, descriptive, symbolic or expressive end. When he began to make these paintings, Richter had his friend
Blinky Palermo randomly call out colors, which Richter then adopted for his work. Chance thus plays its role in the creation of his first series. Returning to color charts in the 1970s, Richter changed his focus from the readymade to the conceptual system, developing mathematical procedures for mixing colors and employing chance operations for their placement. The range of the colors he employed was determined by a mathematical system for mixing the primary colors in graduated amounts. Each color was then randomly ordered to create the resultant composition and form of the painting. Richter's second series of Color Charts was begun in 1971 and consisted of only five paintings. In the final series of Color Charts which preoccupied Richter throughout 1973 and 1974, additional elements to this permutational system of color production were added in the form of mixes of a light grey, a dark gray and later, a green. Richter's
4900 Colours from 2007 consisted of bright monochrome squares that have been randomly arranged in a grid pattern to create stunning fields of kaleidoscopic color. It was produced at the same time he developed his design for the south transept window of
Cologne Cathedral.
4900 Colours consists of 196 panels in 25 colors that can be reassembled in 11 variations – from a single expansive surface to multiple small-format fields. Richter developed
Version II – 49 paintings, each of which measures 97 by 97 centimeters – especially for the
Serpentine Gallery.
Sculpture Richter began to use glass in his work in 1967, when he made
Four Panes of Glass. These plain sheets of glass could tilt away from the poles on which they were mounted at an angle that changed from one installation to the next. In 1970, he and
Blinky Palermo jointly submitted designs for the sports facilities for the
1972 Olympic Games in Munich. For the front of the arena, they proposed an array of glass windows in twenty-seven different colors; each color would appear fifty times, with the distribution determined randomly. In 1981, for a two-person show with
Georg Baselitz in Düsseldorf, Richter produced the first of the monumental transparent mirrors that appear intermittently thereafter in his oeuvre; the mirrors are significantly larger than Richter's paintings and feature adjustable steel mounts. For pieces such as
Mirror Painting (Grey, 735-2) (1991), the mirrors were coloured grey by coating the back of the glass with pigment. Arranged in two rooms, Richter presented an ensemble of paintings and colored mirrors in a special pavilion designed in collaboration with architect Paul Robbrecht at
Documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992. In 2002, for the
Dia Art Foundation, Richter created a glass sculpture in which seven parallel panes of glass refract light and the world beyond, offering altered visions of the exhibition space;
Spiegel I (Mirror I) and
Spiegel II (Mirror II), a two-part mirror piece from 1989 that measures 7' tall and 18' feet long, which alters the boundaries of the environment and again changes one's visual experience of the gallery; and
Kugel (Sphere), 1992, a stainless steel sphere that acts as a mirror, reflecting the space. Since 2002, the artist has created a series of three dimensional glass constructions, such as
6 Standing Glass Panels (2002/2011).
Drawings In 2010, the
Drawing Center showed
Lines which do not exist, a survey of Richter's drawings from 1966 to 2005, including works made using mechanical intervention such as attaching a pencil to an electric hand drill. It was the first career overview of Richter in the United States since
40 Years of Painting at the
Museum of Modern Art in 2002. In a review of
Lines which do not exist, R. H. Lossin wrote in
The Brooklyn Rail: "Viewed as a personal (and possibly professional) deficiency, Richter's drawing practice consisted of diligently documenting something that didn't work—namely a hand that couldn't draw properly. ...Richter displaces the concept of the artist's hand with hard evidence of his own, wobbly, failed, and very material appendage."
Commissions Throughout his career, Richter has mostly declined lucrative licensing deals and private commissions. In 1980, Richter and
Isa Genzken were commissioned to design the König-Heinrich-Platz underground station in
Duisburg; it was only completed in 1992. In 1986, Richter received a commission for two large-scale paintings –
Victoria I and
Victoria II – from the Victoria insurance company in Düsseldorf. In 1990, along with
Sol LeWitt and
Oswald Mathias Ungers, he created works for the
Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechselbank in Düsseldorf. In 1998, he installed a wall piece based on the colours of
Germany's flag in the rebuilt
Reichstag in Berlin. In 2012 he was asked to design the first page of the German newspaper
Die Welt. In 2017 Richter designed the label of the 2015
Chateau Mouton Rothschild's first wine of that year.
Church windows '', c. 2007; stained glass window in the
Cologne Cathedral, tall In 2002, the same year as his
MoMA retrospective, Richter was asked to
design a stained glass window in the
Cologne Cathedral. In August 2007, his window was unveiled. It is an abstract collage of 11,500
pixel-like squares in 72 colors, randomly arranged by computer (with some symmetry), reminiscent of his 1974 painting
4096 colours. The artist waived any fee, and the costs of materials and mounting the window came to around €370,000 ($506,000), covered by donations from more than 1,000 people. Cardinal
Joachim Meisner did not attend the window's unveiling as he would have preferred it to have been a figurative representation of 20th century Christian
martyrs and said that Richter's window would fit better in a mosque or other prayer house. A professed atheist with "a strong leaning towards Catholicism", Richter had his three children with his third wife baptized in the Cologne Cathedral. In September 2020, Richter unveiled his three 30-foot-tall stained-glass windows for the
Tholey Abbey, one of the oldest monasteries in Germany. He called them his last major work, adding that he would focus on drawings and sketches from then on. The large choir windows were made by Gustva van Treeck, an esteemed glass workshop in nearby
Munich. They are abstract painted works inspired by his "Pattern" series from the 1990s. An additional 34 figurative stained glass windows designed for the abbey by
Afghan-German Muslim artist
Mahbuba Maqsoodi are expected to be completed by Easter 2021. The monks of the abbey hoped the windows would promote tourism to the abbey and its town and bring people into the faith. ==Exhibitions==