Gerhard Richter was born on February 9, 1932, in Dresden. He is a German visual artist, known for creating abstract and photorealistic paintings, photographs, and glass pieces. He is widely considered one of the most important contemporary German artists.
He trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in his hometown and, as his final project (1951), painted a mural for the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum. In 1961, after a trip to Moscow, he left East Germany and settled in Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie with Karl Otto Götz and met Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo.
In 1962, he created his first paintings based on photographs, with his first solo exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1963 and 1964. In the mid-1960s, he began the Color Charts and the Graue Malereien (Gray Paintings), and started collecting images and materials for his Atlas project, which would grow over decades. He taught at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1971 to 1994.
In 1972, he exhibited Forty-Eight Portraits at the Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta 5; he also represented Germany at the 36th edition. In 1988, he painted the series 18. Oktober 1977, dedicated to the Baader-Meinhof Group. After moving to Cologne in 1983, his international recognition was solidified with retrospectives in London, Paris, Madrid, and New York.
He has received awards such as the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1997), the Praemium Imperiale, and the Wolf Prize. The Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a major retrospective to him in 2002. In 2007, he unveiled the stained-glass window for Cologne Cathedral.
In recent decades, he has been the subject of major exhibitions in Europe, America, and Asia—including shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020) and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2023)—confirming a trajectory that oscillates between figuration and abstraction, and which has established Richter as a central figure in contemporary art.
