During Gerhard Richter's more than 60-year career, especially in Post-World War II German society, he used both representation and abstraction to deal with personal history, collective memory, and identity.
Gerhard Richter
Since 1970, the German magazine Capital has annually selected the top 100 international contemporary artists in the past year according to strict selection rules. Since 2004, the German painter Schermar Polk, who has been the top of the top 100 for many years, was finally squeezed out by Richter, and he has since become a global art champion.
Phantom Interception, oil on canvas, 140×190cm, 1964
In 2002, before he ascended to the first throne, Richter held a huge retrospective of his 70th birthday in the United States. A critic in New York's Guardian unthinkingly refers to him as the Picasso of the 21st century.
Candles and Skulls, oil on canvas, 100×150cm, 1983
Looking back at the first half of Richter's life, the boy born in Dresden in 1932 grew up in the cruel smoke of World War II and witnessed his hometown being leveled by artillery fire; in the artistic influence of East Germany, he created many figurative paintings with the theme of socialism, and worked as a scene painter assistant in the theater.
Betty, oil on canvas, 102×72cm, 1988
After moving to West Germany, he came to the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, where Joseph Beuys was one of the teachers. At documenta in Kassel in 1959, Richter was first exposed to the many fresh art trends represented by fluxus and pop art at that time, and the works of Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana, Andy Warhol and others made him feel the unbridled freedom in art as never before. In the mid-1960s, Richter's creations made breakthroughs, creating monochromatic paintings based on images in newspapers, magazines and family photo albums.
Duomo milan, created in 1968, sold for $37.125 million at Sotheby's in New York in 2013
Richter, a prolific artist, once wrote in his notes: "What interests me are those gray areas, that is, the process of movement and the combination of tones, and the painterly spaces, the overlapping and connected parts of the picture." "When viewing becomes the thinking process of investigation, the cascading pictures provide more diversified ways of interpreting according to the painting process. It can cause the discussion of the meaning of the opposite two in the overlapping ambiguity.
September, oil on canvas, 52×72cm, 2005
In the mid-1980s, Richter began to use a new way of creating – applying paint continuously, scraping off layer by layer with a scraper, then adding drip-shaped paint and carefully arranged brushstrokes. The resulting cracked surface, with an irregular accumulation of textures and tones, is like a rewrite with a layer of traces below. Richter's abstract works, often in the form of series, seem to challenge and emphasize a system of seriality and repetition.
4900 Colors, Natural Lacquer, 680×680cm, 2007
The center of gravity of the art world began to shift to individual artists, and Richter had become an asset class. Few can assert that an artist has achieved the same artistic achievements as Pablo Picasso or Andy Warhol, but the art world seems to be putting the living Richter on the auction "altar" ahead of schedule.
Richter's Candle Painting was the first work to fetch a high auction price. After his MoMA exhibition in New York in 2001, Sotheby's auctioned off his Three Candles for $5.3 million.
In 2011, Gerhard's works sold for $200 million, ranking first in the auction price of works by "living" artists, even higher than the total prices of works by Monet, Giacometti, Rothko and others. At Richter Gallery in New York, the average single piece sold for $3 million on long pre-orders. For nearly a decade, his work has attracted almost fanatical pursuit among buyers in the market, with nearly 50 of his works sold for more than $10 million at public auction. Richter's market is in full swing and is arguably the best-selling artist in existence.
In 1986, Abstract Painting sold for a record $30.4 million in 2015
Richter's auction market has been popular not only the "unrequited love" of market demand, but also the exhibition planning team. Art institutions, such as auction houses and museums and galleries, are eager to cultivate new "big names" in the art world to exhibit their works around the world.
The 1982 masterpiece "Iceberg" was 148 million yuan at Sotheby's in London
Collectors and agents who were pouring into the art market also seized the opportunity to trade Richter's works for profit. Among the many buyers, there are French luxury giant Bernard Arnault, art super dealer Larry Gagosian... Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich is also a big fan of Richter, who bought a large rubber roller abstract painting by Richter for $15.2 million in May 2008; Chen Taiming, founder of Taiwan's National Giant Corporation and a famous Chinese collector, has collected several of Richter's works.
Abstract Painting (649-2) sold for HK$214.6 million at Sotheby's Autumn Auction in Hong Kong in October, the highest priced Western artwork ever auctioned in Asia
In the eyes of the Germans, Richter was like a "Puritan of the art world", advocating logic, seriousness and classicism. "I am not a modernist artist". Richter said, "Modern art has always given me the impression of being popular and boastful, and I can't do it."