Gerhard Richter valuation
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.
What a work by Gerhard Richter is worth
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 is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
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.
Editions, and the catalogues to check
Richter's editions, the prints, photographs, books, objects and painted editions he has issued since 1965, are catalogued by Hubertus Butin and Stefan Gronert in Gerhard Richter: Editions 1965–2013, and a Butin number is what a buyer expects for anything in its range. Later editions, including facsimile works published by HENI in London, carry the publisher's own references instead.
The paintings and unique works are recorded in the multi-volume catalogue raisonné edited by Dietmar Elger of the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden, and the artist's own website reproduces the numbers and images, which makes it the quickest first check. The overpainted photographs, small unique works he has made since the mid-1980s, have their own comprehensive catalogue.
Dresden murals, Atlas and the Cologne window
At the Dresden academy Richter painted a wall painting, Communion with Picasso, in 1955, and a mural, Lebensfreude, for the German Hygiene Museum for his diploma. He and his wife Marianne left for the West two months before the Berlin Wall went up. Atlas, his archive of photographs and sketches, was first shown in Utrecht in 1972 with 315 parts and has grown ever since. 48 Portraits, of 1971 and 1972, shows composers and writers such as Mahler, Sibelius, H. G. Wells and Kafka, and in 1972 he made a large multipart work for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
For the first Colour Charts, in 1966, Blinky Palermo called out colours at random for him to use. He made more than 100 prints between 1965 and 1974 and then stopped. The first mirrors date from a two-person show with Georg Baselitz in Düsseldorf in 1981, and in 1975 Gilbert & George commissioned a portrait of themselves from him. The Cologne Cathedral window, unveiled in August 2007, is 11,500 squares of glass in 72 colours placed by computer, and he waived his fee. Sonic Youth used one of his paintings on the cover of Daydream Nation in 1988.
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.
