Gerhard Richter is Europe's most expensive living artist

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

He is considered the most influential, most famous living artist. The total value of works sold at auctions exceeded half a billion dollars. The price record for a single item was set in February 2015 by an abstract composition, which was paid about $44.5 million.

Gerhard Richter, being at a venerable age, loves solitude and actively continues to work in his studio near Cologne. Each new exhibition of his works surprises with the novelty of creative searches and becomes the brightest event in the artistic life of Europe and the world.

Germany, East Germany, Germany

He was born in 1932 in Dresden. Father - Horst Richter - was a school teacher, but his mother, Hildegard, had a greater influence on Gerhard's spiritual development. She supported her son's early interest in art.

In 1951, Gerhard Richter entered the Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Dresden Higher School of Fine Arts, where he received a solid academic education. The artistic life of East Germany, where Gerhard was born, became more and more ideological. The period of the young artist's initial training in the profession took place in an environment where socialist realism became the main artistic style, and in the conditions of the struggle against formalism and abstractionism, it was the only one at all.

In 1958, Richter visited the city of Kassel (a territory of West Germany) at an exhibition of contemporary art called "Document". It was aimed at overcoming the Nazi heritage in art - avant-garde was also persecuted during the time of fascism. The paintings of artists who embodied the most avant-garde ideas - Jason Pollock, Jean Fautrier, Lucio Fontana and others - made a revolution in Richter's thinking. The desire to find the freedom of creativity led him to the decision to emigrate, although he always considered himself an apolitical artist. In 1961, Gerhard Richter becomes a political refugee and ends up in Germany.

Experimental time

In 1961, Richter, although he completed a course at the Dresden Higher School, again becomes a student. He enters the Dusseldorf Art Academy. The scholarship he receives there has become a significant help in the life of an emigrant. His life during this period was a search for his own path in art and a time of constant experimentation. He tries his hand at almost all areas of modern painting - from abstract expressionism to pop art.

Gerhard finds like-minded people among his classmates, among whomSigmar Polke, Konrad Fischer. In 1963, in one of the empty shops in the center of Düsseldorf, their joint exhibition opens, in which pop art compositions are complemented by a performance with the participation of living sculptures, film projection, etc. Richter and his friends called their creative style capitalist realism, not without irony.

Gerhard Richter considered most of his works of that time of little value and destroyed them. But it was then that his first paintings appeared, created on the basis of black and white photographs, in which a realistic image is subjected to a characteristic blur that has become the hallmark of the master.

Since 1964, after graduating from the Academy, the independent path of the artist begins.

The road to recognition

In 1967, Richter was awarded the Kunstpreis junger westen - an award that honors the most talented young artists in Germany, and in 1971, a whole pavilion at the famous Venice Biennale is assigned to his works. In 1973, the first personal exhibition of the artist in the USA took place.

Since then, his paintings have appeared in the most prestigious public and private collections. In addition to the purely artistic merits of his works, specialists and viewers note the scale of the creator's searches and experiments. Richter's ideas inspire artists around the world, becoming the basis of new trends in contemporary painting.

Classification difficulties

"In my art there is no program, no single style, no common direction," Gerhard Richter likes to repeat. Pictures of himvaried in genres and themes. In addition to works created at the intersection of painting and photography, the master creates non-objective multi-layer colorful compositions, born with the help of scrapers, brushes and a squeegee - a wide spatula that distributes colorful mixtures over a large plane.

Known for his monochrome (gray) minimalist canvases and non-objective and figurative, hyper-realistic portraits and landscapes, as well as amazing still lifes in the style of photo painting - such are "Candles", created in the early 1980s, and much more. He participated in the restoration of the famous stained glass windows in the Cologne Cathedral. Sculpture is also present at the most recent exhibitions - three-dimensional compositions of glass sheets located at different angles.

Richter in the 21st century

In total, about three thousand paintings by the artist are known. Despite Richter's stroke, about two hundred of his new paintings appear every year.

He is embarrassed and confused by the prices at which his works are purchased at auctions. He shows doubts about their justification, saying that today the very essence of artistic creativity is changing. At the same time, the share of skepticism in his assessment of the role of pure art in modern life is growing. Despite this, he is full of energy and desire to work and create.