Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden and came of age in World War II era and postwar East Germany, an experience whose traumas run through his work. He trained at the Dresden Academy, then under Communist control and teaching a Socialist Realist style, and graduated in 1956 into a career as a mural painter. Frustrated by censorship, and galvanized by seeing work by Pollock, Fautrier, and Fontana at Documenta II in 1959, he fled to West Germany in 1961 and declared himself a refugee.

In Dusseldorf he enrolled at the Art Academy and fell in with peers including Sigmar Polke, Konrad Fischer, and Blinky Palermo, with whom he staged the now famous 1963 demonstration for Capitalist Realism in a furniture store. He developed his blurred photo-painting style, reworking found photographs as out-of-focus, largely black and white paintings, and produced touchstones such as Ema (Nude on a Staircase) in 1966, along with the Colour Charts that replicated paint sample cards. From the 1970s he moved fluidly between figuration and abstraction, building the ongoing Gray Paintings and the squeegee-built Abstraktes Bild series that now anchor much of his market.

Richter has won many of the field's major honors, among them the Oskar Kokoschka Prize in 1985, the Wolf Prize in 1994, and the Praemium Imperiale in 1997, and the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective, Forty Years of Painting, in 2002. He is represented by David Zwirner and Gagosian, and he lives and works in Cologne.

Richter is among the rare living painters on whom the critical consensus is close to unanimous, though it took decades to settle. The turning point in the United States was the Museum of Modern Art's 2002 retrospective Forty Years of Painting, curated by Robert Storr, whose catalogue essay argued that Richter had kept painting alive as a serious medium at a moment when many had pronounced it exhausted, and read the restless movement between photorealism and abstraction as the point rather than a contradiction. Reviewing that show, Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic of The New York Times, called Richter Europe's most challenging modern painter, a phrase that captured the emerging view of him as the central European artist of his generation. The critical questions that remain tend to circle the same paradox the work invites: whether the refusal to commit to a single style is a profound meditation on doubt and the unreliability of images, or a virtuoso's evasion. The institutions have answered with their walls, from Tate to the long-term presentation of 100 Works for Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie.

Richter's market is defined by both height and breadth. His auction high is Abstraktes Bild (599) of 1986, which sold for about USD 46.3 million at Sotheby's London in 2015, and the large squeegee abstractions are generally the strongest performers, followed by the most iconic photo-paintings. Beneath those headline works lies a deep and active market across his many series and media, which is what keeps him consistently among the top artists by auction turnover.

That depth is the defining feature for a collector. Because so many works trade, price discovery is good and liquidity is unusually high for an artist at this level. At the same time, the spread between a major squeegee abstraction, a historically important photo-painting, and an editioned or minor work is very wide, so series, period, and quality drive value far more than the name alone.

The most useful frame for Richter is that the name guarantees demand but not value, because the range across his series is enormous. The large Abstraktes Bild squeegee paintings and the canonical photo-paintings sit at the top, while editions and lesser works trade far below, so identifying which series and period a work belongs to is the first step in any assessment. Authentication is unusually well supported: a six-volume catalogue raisonne of the paintings exists alongside the artist's own website, which functions as a working registry, and the standing guidance is not to acquire any work that does not appear in one of them. That documentation, combined with the market's exceptional liquidity, makes Richter one of the more transactable blue-chip names, provided the specific work is verified against the catalogue raisonne before purchase.