Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter is a German artist born in Dresden on February 9, 1932. A very gifted child, but a poor student, he dropped out of Zittau secondary school and instead joined a vocational school, where he studied shorthand, accounting and Russian . In 1942 he was forced to join the Pimpfe section, an organization preparing children for the Hitler Youth, but was too young to be drafted into the army. After initial training as a painter, he obtained a master's degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, a diploma which enabled him to benefit from a workshop for three years. Passionate about abstract painting, especially the works of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana, he decided to move to the West in 1961. He finally settled in Düsseldorf where he was a pupil of Karl-Otto Götz and met Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo. Positioning himself both as an everyday photographer and a painter, Gerhard Richter reproduces the subjects of his photos on his canvases. Thus, landscapes, still lifes and intimate scenes complete a work moreover mainly made up of abstract works. In 1972, the press photos, his own photos and the amateur photographs he collected were brought together to form an atlas on display to the public. In addition to his personal exhibitions visible all over the world, he works as a teacher in several art schools and receives numerous awards including the Junger Western Art in Recklinghausen in 1967, the Arnold Bode prize at the Documenta in Cassel in 1981, the Oskar Kokoschka Prize in Vienna in 1985, the Wolf Prize for the Arts in Israel in 1994/95 and the Praemium Imperiale in Japan in 1997.