Dietmar Elger

Gerhard Richter is one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era. For decades he has sought innovative ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture. Always fascinated with the limits and uncertainties of representation, he has since then produced landscapes, abstractions, show more glass and mirror constructions, prints, sculptures, and installations.Though Richter has been known in the United States for quite some time, the highly successful retrospective of his work at the MoMA in 2002 catapulted him to unprecedented fame. Enter noted curator Dietmar Elger, who here presents the first biography of this contemporary artist. Written with full access to Richter and his archives, this fascinating book offers unprecedented insight into his life and work. Elger explores Richter’s childhood in Nazi Germany; his years as a student and mural painter in communist East Germany; his time in the West during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, when student protests, political strife, and violence tore the Federal Republic of Germany apart; and his rise to international acclaim during the 1980s and beyond.Richter has always been a difficult personality to parse and the seemingly contradictory strands of his artistic practice have frustrated and sometimes confounded critics. But the extensive interviews on which this book is based disclose a Richter who is far more candid, personal, and vivid than ever before. The result is a book that will be the foundational portrait of this artist for years to come.

Gerhard Richter, geboren 1932, gilt heute weltweit als einer der ein¿ussreichsten internationalen Künstler. In den vergangenen vierzig Jahren ist ein Werk entstanden, das seine herausragende aktuelle Position aus dem Dialog der Malerei mit dem mechanischen Reproduktionsmedium der Fotogra¿e gewonnen hat. Die für sein Œuvre charakteristische thematische Vielfalt und der stilistische Bruch erwiesen sich dabei nicht als Widerspruch, sondern lediglich als Wechsel des Blickpunktes bei dem Versuch, so Richter, sich ein Bild von dieser Welt zu machen.

Während zahlreiche Kritiker die Malerei von Gerhard Richter als ein 'Werk ohne Autor' charakterisiert haben, worin der Künstler sie durch sein beharrliches Leugnen jeglicher privater Ein¿üsse auf seine Arbeit bestärkt hat, gelingt Dietmar Elger durch den Rückbezug auf die Biogra¿e Gerhard Richters eine neue Sicht auf das Werk: mit überraschenden Interpretationen für viele bekannte Bilder.

Für seine Darstellung hat der Autor nicht nur das publizierte Material zu Gerhard Richter ausgewertet, er erhielt auch uneingeschränkten Zugang zum Archiv und dem gesamten Schriftverkehr im Atelier des Künstlers. Vor allem aber sind in das Buch die Ergebnisse ausführlicher Gespräche mit dem Künstler sowie mehreren Zeitzeugen eingegangen.

Die erste authentische Biografie eines der international bedeutendsten Maler der Gegenwar show less

The Elbe monotypes were made by Gerhard Richter in 1957, just one year after he had graduated from art college in Dresden. Abstract, somewhat melancholic and comparatively small in scale, these 31 works were placed in the safekeeping of a friend when Richter fled the GDR in 1961, and have never previously been published. They are here reproduced in their original full-size format, on chamois-colored A4 paper, in a beautiful large-format edition. It was not until 2008 that Richter signed, show more numbered and titled the sequence, recuperating it back into his oeuvre a half-century later. The Elbe monotypes foreshadow Richter's later abstractionism, and are fascinating in their subtle oscillation between figure, landscape and abstraction. In an afterword, Dieter Schwarz explicates some of the particularities of Richter's process, which utilized a rubber roller invented by Richter himself. show less

Two volumes in box. One volume with texts, the second with photos and descriptions of the complete work.