East German escapee who paints photos and pure blur
Born in Dresden on 9 February 1932, Gerhard Richter fled East Germany with his wife weeks before the Berlin Wall rose in 1961. In the West he reinvented painting as both razor photorealism and scraped abstraction, enough for critics to call him the Picasso of the twenty-first century.
He grew up in Reichenau, now Bogatynia, and Waltersdorf, where his father taught. After tenth grade he apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, then studied at the Dresden Academy, completing murals such as Communion with Picasso in 1955 and Joy of Life for the Hygiene Museum. As a master trainee from 1957 to 1961 he took East German commissions including Workers' Struggle and portraits, work later painted over for ideology after his escape.
In Dusseldorf he studied under Karl Otto Gotz beside Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, helping launch Capitalist Realism. He married Marianne Eufinger in 1957, sculptor Isa Genzken in 1982, and Sabine Moritz in 1995. Across decades he has toggled among blurred photo-based oils, glass, and color-chart abstractions, treating mechanical images and handmade paint as equal problems.
Auction markets and museum surveys keep elevating him as a leading living European painter. The biography matters: a childhood under National Socialism, socialist realism training, then a deliberate leap into Western experimental painting. That double education, official mural craft plus Dusseldorf irreverence, explains why his canvases can look like newspaper photos one year and scraped gray fields the next without changing author. His photoreal canvases often begin from found snapshots that he projects, paints, and then softens with a squeegee so memory and media blur together. Glass works and chance color charts extend the same doubt about whether painting should confess emotion or imitate machines. Living through dictatorship, escape, and Western celebrity, he keeps returning to gray as a refusal of propaganda certainty.
Source: Gerhard Richter
