Richter, born in Germany, received his first artistic training at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from Karl Otto Gotz in the early 1960s. Around the same time, he began interacting with other emerging artists like Sigmar Polke and Konrad Fischer-Lueg with whom he’d later form the group called the Capitalist Realists, a group centered on satire, inspired by current political conditions.

In 1963, he held his first solo exhibition at Mobelhaus Berges in Dusseldorf, unveiling his highly nostalgic photo-derived style of painting. His first exhibit in U.S. was held in 1973. Fifteen years later, he received his first North American retrospective by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited a retrospective of his work in 2001 called “Forty Years of Painting”. The work featured showed the artist’s range and diversity within his catalog, especially between his early dark, blurred works with his later abstract paintings, some of which had a brilliant palette.

He has received numerous awards, including Japan’s Praemium Imperiale Award, the Wolf Prize from Israel’s Wolf Foundation, the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, the Arnold Bode Prize and Junger Wester Art Prize.

Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman Paris January 27-March 1, 2008 [ArtObserved]