A taste of Gerhard Richter’s 60-year career

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Seascape, 1975. (Private collection New York) Seascape belongs to a series of images of icy artic waters based on photographs Richter had taken during a trip to Greenland. 1975 and 1976 were bleak years in his life: his marriage to his first wife was ending and he found it difficult to move on. Fondation Beyeler

S. and child, 1995. (Hamburg Kunsthalle) At the age of 62, Richter found marital happiness with the 25-year-old artist Sabine Moritz. A series of eight paintings from 1995 show Sabine with their newborn son. Fondation Beyeler

S. and child, 1995. (Hamburg Kunsthalle) The series of paintings showing Sabine with their son are among the most intimate and personal of Richter's oeuvre. Fondation Beyeler

Reader, 1994. (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) Richter made several photo-paintings immediately after meeting Sabine that are revealing of his newfound sense of tranquillity and happiness. Fondation Beyeler

Bach (1), 1992. (Moderna Museet, Stockholm) Richter had already begun in 1972 to work with bright colours, but he waited 20 years to use them in an abstract manner, the way he does in this series of four large paintings inspired by the music of Bach. Composers are a recurring theme with Richter. The six large Cage (2006) paintings were inspired by the American composer John Cage. Fondation Beyeler

Woods, 2005. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) In 2005, Richter assembled 285 photographs taken in a forest close to Cologne from which he made a book entitled Wald (Woods), as well as a series of 12 tall paintings to which this one belongs. He had by this time perfected the use of the glass and wood squeegee that he invented and that allows him to scrape through the different layers of superimposed paint. Fondation Beyeler

Flowers, 1992. (Hamburg Kunsthalle) Richter says of his small photo-paintings that they are a way of taking a rest from the large abstract paintings that require tremendous physical force. Fondation Beyeler

Betty, 1988. (Saint Louis Art Museum) Richter’s production in 1988 could not have been more diverse. He did the bleak October Baader-Meinhof cycle, but he also made a portrait of his young daughter, Betty, from his first marriage. This painting is one of his most iconic and is shown at the Beyeler in the same room as Bach and Reader, producing an effect of harmony and quiet joy. Fondation Beyeler

Annunciation after Titian, 1973. (Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.) In 1972 Richter entered into his phase of Vermalung, or 'Inpainting', in which figurative images were reworked, as if to make them disappear into the canvas. In 1973, he made five versions of Annunciation after Titian. Fondation Beyeler

Annunciation after Titian, 1973. (Kunstmuseum Basel) All five versions of Annunciation after Titian, each one gradually more obliterated into the background, are shown at Beyeler for the first time together. Fondation Beyeler

Ella, 2007. (Private collection) Ella, Richter’s daughter with Sabine Moritz, was born in 1996, the year the artist and his family moved into their newly built home in Hahnwald in the south of Cologne, part of which is Richter’s studio. This little portrait, made when Ella was ten, also belongs to the pantheon of Richter icons.

Record player, 1988. (Museum of Modern Art, New York) From very early on, Richter used images found in newspapers and magazines as foundations for his photo-paintings, often capitalising on the public’s lurid fascination with disasters and death. The painting depicts the record player of Andreas Baader, member of the German terrorist group, Red Army Faction, inside Baader’s cell in prison. It is one of the paintings from his October 18, 1977 cycle. Fondation Beyeler

Iceberg in Mist, 1982. (The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection) In 1981 and 1982, Richter made a series of misty landscapes of mountains and icebergs, following up on one already started in 1975 and reminiscent of the German Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich, whom he admired. Richter often works in cycles, coming back several years later to themes started earlier. Fondation Beyeler

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Gerhard Richter's work is diverse in theme and style. The exhibition at the Beyeler Fondation is the largest ever in Switzerland to be devoted to the German artist.

The exhibition, on until September 2014, encompasses major periods in his career, including recent works not yet seen in public.

In a career spanning 60 years, Richter’s work has ranged from photo-based paintings to abstract works, the latter of which feature colour to monochrome fields and digitally generated compositions.

Architectural context is important when it comes to his work, he says. “That is such a dream of mine – that the pictures will become an environment or become architecture.”

Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter escaped East Germany when he was 29, after studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he learned mural painting. In 1964 he started his photo-based paintings and had his first solo exhibition. Since then, according to Artindex 2014, Gerhard Richter has accumulated the largest number of lifetime exhibitions (1,256).

The Beyeler show was put together by Swiss star curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

(Images: Fondation Beyeler, Text: Jessica Dacey and Michèle Laird, swissinfo.ch)