Who is Gerhard Richter?
Gerhard Richter is the star of the Kunst Fest. His work is so literary and he talks about it so much that we must constantly remind ourselves that he is an artist — and that paintings, not words, are his most important product. Richter can paint as beautifully as Titian or Vermeer. He can transform banal imagery into powerful paintings. When he experiments with abstraction, he succeeds at everything he tries and, seemingly by accident, discovers that he is a superb colorist. Congenitally ambivalent, Richter can hardly make an image without wanting to wound or deny it. Many of his paintings respond to the stylistic excesses of other artists and he needs the art world as a foil — at least that’s what his words suggest. Like Picasso, Richter pillages art history. His remarkable gifts allow him to take huge risks. With Richter, everything comes back to painting. That’s what he does. Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932, Richter joined the Hitler Youth in boyhood, witnessed the Allied bombin
