Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 on February 9. He was the first child of Horst

Richter, who worked as a teacher at the secondary school, and his wife Hildegard, a bookseller who also loved playing the piano. The young Gerhard would welcome his sister four years later into the family which was an average middle-class household. The Richter family moved in 1935 as his father accepted a teaching position at a school in Reichenau, currently known as Bogatynia, Poland. Doing so, the family was largely safe from the war to come in which Horst Richter was called up to join the army. He was eventually detained by the

Allied forces as a prisoner of war and was only released in 1946. The family relocated once more to Watersdorf, experiencing difficult years due to the lingering effects of the

Second World War in which his father had participated as a Nazi soldier. The war had left a deep impact on the young Gerhard, marked by economic hardship and personal loss. He lost his uncles and aunts in the war and vividly recalls his mother's screaming when they received the horrible news. Gerhard Richter reflects upon this period with a mixture of frustration and fondness. Personally, he experienced the war as a child from a safe distance, but close enough to recall the vast impact of the terrors which happened around him. Richter himself seemed to be a highly gifted child, but a notoriously bad student in school. By the age of 15, Gerhard Richter started to draw on a regular basis, creating landscapes, self-portraits, nudes and more. Genres he would continue to work with throughout his career. In 1947 in

Zittau, he would start taking his first evening classes in painting, while he was not aspiring to become a professional artist yet. From 1948 until 1951, he would study stage and billboard painting, before returning to his birth town Dresden during the summer to start his formal art studies at the Dresden Art Academy.

Many buildings in Dresden were still in ruins due to the bombing, as they still had to walk through rubble and stones to get from one building to the next. After having lived with his aunt Gretel for a while, he moved into an apartment with some friends in the same street as the apartment of Marianna Oefinger, known as Emma, whom he married in 1957. At the academy, he was trained academically, marked by socialist realism. He joined the department for mural painting, which was a bit less strict. For his thesis, he would paint a mural for the Deutsches Hygienemuseum, which was received very well, resulting in a position in the academy's program for promising students.

Things seemed to be smooth sailing. He had a studio from the academy, a steady income for three years, and was able to do a number of commissioned murals. However, he felt increasingly uncomfortable within the restrictions of the academy. He did not want to commit fully to socialist realism, but was also critical towards the underground art scene and capitalism.

He was in search for a so-called third way, including the best of both spheres, between the East and the West. A crucial event for the development of Gerhard

Richter was visiting documenta zwei in Kassel in 1959. He was strongly impressed by the works of Jackson Pollock or Lucio Fontana. As if an epiphany, Richter realized the creative prohibitions towards abstraction were wrong, as was his very own way of thinking up to that point. Due to the political situation of the Cold War and Richter's realization, the West offers more when it comes to his artistic endeavors. Gerhard and Ema left the

GDR for West Germany.

Doing so, Gerhard and Ema arrived in Dusseldorf, where Richter started to study at the Dusseldorf Academy.

He started out swain, testing everything he could, resulting in a very productive period.

However, afterwards he was unhappy with these works and destroyed many of these paintings, with his true elaborate only starting in 1962. Richter arrived in a vibrant art scene and quickly became friends with, among others, Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo and Konrad Fischer, formerly known as Konrad Lübeck. Due to the presence of Josef Beuys as a professor at the Dusseldorf Academy, Richter was also very impressed by Fluxus. They discovered and engaged with American pop art since 1962. During one of their earliest shows, the group of friends, seen as the German pop artists, presented their own movement, titled Capitalist

Realism, and with reference to Socialist Realism, but also a label Richter wasn't too satisfied about. Richter was interested in current affairs, consumer society, new media and popular culture. He incorporated these elements into his painterly practice, depicting for instance televisions, design magazines, advertisements or political figures and events. This was the genesis of Richter's professional oeuvre, and photography was the starting point, something which used to be impossible with his academic background. He combined photography with his characteristic blurred effect, and immediately started to examine the relationship between both media, photography and painting, a true pillar within his artistic practice. The German artist was interested and fascinated by the dialectic relation between the objectivity and the subjectivity when painting photographs. For Richter, the photograph was the most perfect picture. He could eliminate conscious thinking, as the picture does not change, it is absolute, autonomous, unconditional and not linked to any style. With his blurred effect, he made everything equal, equally important and simultaneously equally unimportant. He was strongly drawn to depicting certain subjects from found photographic material. Think of military subjects, family portraits, images from newspapers or magazines. These selected images all have their very own narrative and motive to be painted, most often combining death or suffering, and its exploitation of death and suffering in media. From 1963 until 1964, Richter had his first exhibitions and commercial successes, collaborating with several galleries, and also collectors were starting to get really interested in his work and career. A landmark year for Gerhard Richter was 1966, for many reasons. The first, the birth of his daughter, Betty, whom he iconically painted in 1988. He also painted his wife

Emma, nude on a staircase, one of his most famous works he ever painted, and he took on geometric abstraction with his colour chart, influenced by his friend Blinky Palermo, but also influenced by pop art and minimal art. Richter had already been experimenting with abstraction and minimal painting, think of the abstracted blur or washed out zones of oil paint, but also depicting very minimal elements, such as curtains, tubes, turning sheets or daily objects. The colour charts were copies of paint sample cards, which paved the way for Richter's future abstract paintings. After Emma, nude on a staircase, Richter would paint several erotic nudes in 1967, followed by cityscapes, aerial views, mountains, starscapes, clouds, seascapes and landscapes in 1968 and 1969. With these artworks, there is this notion of both an almost nostalgic romanticism and an ongoing exploration of abstraction. He would paint many shadow pictures, corrugated iron as a geometric abstract work, grey monochromes, colour streaks and grit, arriving at pure abstraction and questioning the limits of representation. By the end of the decade, Richter had established himself as a contemporary artist, participating in group exhibitions across the globe. In 1969, he was included in the exhibition Nine Young Artists at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, his first show at a major institution. However, Richter was still unsure about his future and in search for a specific direction, so his paints and the experiments would continue.

With his career on the rise, Richter was exhibiting with his good friend Conrad Fischer, who became a very progressive gallerist, showcasing the top artists of minimal art, conceptual art and formalism. Think of Karl André, Sol Lewitt, Bruce Nauman, Fred Sambach, On Kawara or Richard Long. In this context, Richter felt much more at home with painting, allowing the artist to take on painting outside of its tradition, questioning it as no other artist had done before. During the first years of this decade, Richter painted many portraits, of which a specific series of 48 portraits would be showcased at the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972, followed by participating in Documenta V in Kassel.

But he would also continue to create grid paintings and especially grey monochrome paintings.

These experiments brought him to his formalum or in-paintings, in which he continued to examine the relation between representation and abstraction. What started as a representational painting was being reworked in such a manner, the imagery was entirely obliterated, using gestural brushstrokes and thick impastos. Uniquely, Richter made these gestural brushstrokes without being expressive, pulling the paint across the canvas in an emotionless manner, involving expression as an impelling force of painting. Doing so, Richter emphasised the painterly gesture, a witness of Richter's engagement towards the abstract as a counter-model of the figurative, coming to terms with the new possibilities for painting offered by abstraction and minimalism. Furthermore, from a personal perspective, the 1970s were not the happiest of years for Gerhard Richter, as his marriage with Emma was gradually coming to an end, and he lost his very dear friend Blinke Palermo unexpectedly in 1976. As a result, his grey paintings, but also his figurative works, think of his seascapes in particular, are embedded with a deep melancholy.

In 1977, Richter took on new directions, creating two sculptural pieces using glass, something he would develop further in the future, but also introducing colourful abstract works, referred to as abstractive bild or abstract painting. A new investigation of perception, colour light, space depth and optics emerged, and as Richter formally separated from Emma in 1979, a decade which was dominated by grey ended with colour and marked a new chapter in the life and oeuvre of Gerhard Richter.

The following decade, Richter's fame would rise to astronomical heights. The general interest in painting was strongly being reinvigorated, think of the arrival of New Expressionism for instance, and Richter was seen by many as the forerunner of this revival of painting.

Gerhard Richter got together with Isa Genzken, one of the most important sculptors of the contemporary era, as they got married in 1982. They would move to a new and larger studio offered by Richter's gallerist Rudolf Swerner in Cologne. At this very moment, he was really getting into his stride with his abstract paintings. With his abstract paintings being very successful, there was somewhat a question mark next to his figurative paintings. However, at this point in time, he painted his iconic candles during the first half of the decade, but also new landscapes in a very close dialogue with his abstract works, indicating the close alignment of both spheres in Richter's oeuvre. Even more, during the second half of the 1980s,

Richter would create stunning field and meadow pieces, followed by his famous and notorious

Badermannhof pictures, one of his most controversial theories, discussing a group of radicals in

Germany and terrorist attacks in the 1970s, a topic which was Richter's most provocative and politically charged body of work up to this day. His abstract works developed towards his characteristic technique using a large squeegee instead of a paintbrush, pushing the colour across the surface, creating new depths, textures and contrasts. The variety of his oeuvre could easily have been a pitfall for Richter's career, but in the end, it was his greatest strength. During the 1980s, and in particular by the end of the decade, Richter achieved true international recognition. In 1985, he received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize and had his first major retrospective, and by the turn of the decade, he was being represented by industry-leading galleries, such as Marion Goodman in New York, or Anthony Dauphine in London.

The 1990s would be filled with one-man shows, awards and recognitions. He started the decade strongly committed to his abstract paintings, and would also continue to experiment with mirrors and glass, a result of his ongoing interest in minimal abstraction. The intersection of both was also noticeable in his abstract painterly practice, with structures and minimal abstraction, using stripes and grids as another chapter in his painterly research. With Richter, his personal life is often reflected in his work. In 1993, he painted a series of works of his wife Isa Gensgen, with her back faced to the artist, as if a certain detachment is being suggested. Shortly after, they would go their separate ways. Richter met Sabine

Moritz, another contemporary artist, and got married shortly after his divorce. In 1995, they had a son named Moritz, followed by a series of paintings of mother and child, once again utmost personal and intimate, hence its power. The family moved to a new home in the south of Cologne, and in 1996, they would welcome their daughter, Ella Maria.

The German artist would continue to produce predominantly abstract works, as it came very natural to him. He also discovered a new genre in the 1990s, which was his overpainted photographs.

Doing so, once more, he negotiated with languages of figuration, abstraction, and of course, the photograph.

During the 21st century, Richter would continue to gather awards, honours and retrospectives, becoming the most famous painter today, and arguably the most famous living artist today.

He started the new millennium with a major retrospective in 2002 at the Museum of Modern

Art, MoMA, in New York. The title was Gerhard Richter, Forty Years of Painting, showcasing 190 works, which is, up to this date, his most comprehensive retrospective. He continued to focus on his abstract paintings, followed by some figurative works and experimentations with glass. In 2005, he painted September, depicting the attacks on the World Trade Center in a way only Richter could do. A small painting, but filled with power. In 2006, the artist would paint his famous Cage paintings, six monumental canvases, titled after John Cage, acquired by Tate Modern in 2008, which are currently on display up to this very day.

In 2007, Richter completed his commission for a new stained-glass window for the Cologne

Cathedral, inspired by his 1974 painting titled 4094 Colors. In the following year, the German painter started his series of colourful abstract works titled Sinbad. From 2011 and onwards,

Richter would also experiment with the use of technology and digital prints. Think of his horizontal bounds of colour, titled Strips. Since 2010, one could argue, Richter reached the peak of the art world. Amazingly, the artist continues to consolidate his position, finding new directions with his practice year to year. Gerhard Richter is undoubtedly one of the most successful and most influential artists of his generation. So in the end, it was the painting who took a young boy from Dresden by the hand, to become a highly established artist travelling the world. This was the story of Gerhard Richter.