Gerhard Richter
Blurred photographs and squeegeed abstraction, made by the same man for sixty years, on purpose.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, trained in socialist realist mural painting, and left East Germany months before the Wall went up. With Polke he announced Capitalist Realism in 1963. Since then he has worked simultaneously in two apparently incompatible modes: photo-paintings, made from found and family photographs and then dragged with a dry brush until they blur, and the large abstracts built and destroyed with a squeegee. He has also made grey monochromes, colour charts, glass and mirror works, and the Cologne Cathedral window. He is generally the most valuable living painter at auction.
Richter keeps his own catalogue raisonne and numbers virtually everything, which makes identification unusually straightforward and forgery unusually difficult — but the Richter number is what any buyer looks for first, and its absence needs explaining. The editions are a very large and important body of work in their own right, including prints, photographs overpainted by hand, and objects, catalogued separately and varying enormously in edition size. Squeegee surfaces are thick, layered and prone to drying cracks, which are original. The artist declines to authenticate work.
If you own a work by Gerhard Richter
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.