Gerhard Richter, the enigmatic master of modern art,
A reliable biography written by his friend, secretary, and archivist.

The descriptions of painter Gerhard Richter are dazzling: a living legend, the most influential artist of our time, the founder of photo-painting, and the owner of a work that fetched 60 billion won at auction.
Although his paintings are displayed in numerous exhibitions, collections, and art markets, there is more to him than meets the eye.
That's understandable, as it's been Richter's long-standing strategy to keep his private life hidden.
This also seems to reflect the influence of his experience of having to secretly escape from former East Germany.
Richter's personal tendency to adamantly refuse to make personal comments about his paintings has led some critics to characterize them as "artworks without an author."
This makes his work more difficult to analyze, frustrating and sometimes perplexing critics.


The author, Dietmar Elger, was a friend, secretary, and director of the Richter Archive, a seemingly enigmatic figure, and is considered one of the greatest connoisseurs of Richter's work.
He observed this master of modern art from up close and wrote a biography that comprehensively covers not only his private life but also his world of works.
The author, who has worked as a curator of painting and sculpture for many years and has planned exhibitions and catalogs for various contemporary artists including Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Richard Tuttle, delves into the personal backgrounds of many of Richter's pictorial motifs in this book, providing readers with deep insights into the life and work of this great artist.

Having experienced all the ideologies created by humans over a century, from the modern era to the early modern era, this old skeptic was unable to see or picture this world through any particular trend or concept.
Even though I don't know, I've probably experienced situations where the artist's cause and determination have become nothing more than scraps of paper every time the world order has changed drastically.
For him, who learned that “it is easy to start, but difficult to reach the end,” the words “I draw” were more urgent than “I drew a great piece of work.”
In a reality where there can be no absolute picture, no beautiful utopia, and no clear truth, he created an artistic formula for viewing the world by repeatedly absorbing and spitting out modernism and postmodernism.

---From "Yoon Hye-jeong - Recommendation"

The current living environment, which Richter created himself in the early 1990s, architecturally demonstrates the relationship between the artist's artistic work and his private life.
Two independent buildings stand on a spacious site on the outskirts of Cologne.
A windowless studio facing the street sits like a screen in front of the artist's home, nestled in a pristine garden.
Although Richter occasionally receives public honors, such as at exhibition openings, he generally prefers to remain hidden from the art world, hiding in the anonymity of his private life.
Trying to shield himself from the public eye is also an old strategy of Gerhard Richter.
When asked by Wulf Herzogenrath in 1972 to submit a portrait for use in an exhibition catalog, Richter instead sent a passport photo of a janitor working at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts.
---From the "Preface"

Gerhard was his mother's favorite child.
She projected her ideals and unfulfilled hopes onto Gerhard.
He inspired the fifteen-year-old boy by becoming enthusiastic about Nietzsche's writings and awakened his interest in various classical literature, including Goethe and Schiller.
On the other hand, she constantly criticized her husband for his lack of interest in culture.
Moreover, his father constantly repeated to young Gerhard that he was a failure.

---「1.
From "Dresden"

The decision to return to art studies five years after graduating from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts was a momentous decision in Gerhard Richter's career.
In fact, he had no interest in art education in the traditional sense of the word at the time.
If that were the case, I would have received a better education in Dresden than in Düsseldorf.
At the time, Richter needed a place where he could escape his personal and artistic isolation, work, and above all, meet other artists.
That is, after escaping East Germany, what I missed most was the community and conversations with like-minded people.
His dream was fulfilled beyond his expectations when he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts.
Richter met his friends and artistic partners of the 1960s, Konrad Lueck, Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo, all here.

---「2.
From “Capitalist Realism”

Like the Impressionist art photographers, the blurring technique also served as a visual expression of Richter's philosophical stance on a perception of reality that could no longer believe in the possibility of clear truth.
In a 1972 interview with Rolf Schön, Richter said:
“There is nothing clearer about reality than my relationship to it, which is made up of ambiguity, uncertainty, transience, and fragmentation.”
---「3.
From the "Exhibition"

Critics have often interpreted Richter's choice of photographic images as motifs between 1962 and 1967 as a "subjective meaninglessness" and "indiscriminate arbitrariness."
His method of juxtaposing or indiscriminately arranging images from various areas of life and thematic contexts did not reveal any concept of their content.
Only the medium context of having a circular photographic image tied all the works together.
Moreover, it was difficult to find any indication that the author had any particular interest in any particular subject.
The fact that various templates were chosen and printed in a personal environment does not show the motivation behind the content of the work, but only reveals that the materials were easy to obtain.
In late 1997, Susanne Ehrenfried wrote in her essay on Richter's portraits, Ohne Eigenschaften, Without Character:
“Terms such as absence of selection, absence of composition, absence of style, absence of content are characteristic of Richter’s work.” Richter has long been interpreted in this way, and he himself has repeatedly supported this interpretation by emphasizing his indifferent attitude towards the subject matter of his paintings.
“I pursue no purpose, no system, no tendency.
I have no platform, no style, no mission.
Neither the technical issues, nor the subject matter of the work, nor the artisanal variations are of any interest to me.
I don't want to make any decisions, and I don't know what I want.
I am inconsistent, indifferent and passive.
“I like things that are unconstrained and unprescriptive, and endless uncertainty.”
---「5.
From "Uncle Rudy"

Richter still remembers the awe he felt at the time for the work of artists like Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt, and the self-reproach he felt that he could never create anything like it.
So, while the original Corsican motifs arose from artistic anxiety, they were by no means formed in opposition to minimal and conceptual art.
Rather, Gerhard Richter initially described these works as personal paintings without artistic aspirations to be trend-setting.
Nevertheless, it took courage for Richter to paint romantic landscapes.
He gained this courage by convincing himself that he was painting for himself and not for the public.
“These paintings are not so much about opposing minimal art as about giving up on it because I had nothing to do in that field.
So, I thought I would become a weirdo who does what I love, doesn't belong anywhere, and creates a romantic atmosphere."
---「6.
From "Breaking Style as a Style Principle"

This interplay between representation and representation of reality can be applied to any motif, but Gerhard Richter deliberately chose this approach in two works.
This not only gives substantial legitimacy to the elongated form of the work, but above all, it shows the pictorial concept of the work thematically.
Both paintings strikingly reflect Richter's fundamental artistic concern to use the possibilities and limitations of painting to perceive and understand reality.
Therefore, this work represents, above all, Richter's skepticism toward all attempts to express this world in pictures.
When even ordinary brushstrokes, upon closer inspection, turn out to be nothing more than mere appearances, one wonders how long such attempts can last.
In the grayscale photo-paintings of the 1960s, blurriness signifies the inaccuracy of the depicted reality and thus expresses a lack of perceptual ability.
However, in "Stroke", the fragmentation of the perceptual process shows that a holistic experience of reality is impossible.
The picture clearly reveals both.
On the one hand, it is an illusionistic expression of pictorial gestures, but on the other hand, it shows the viewers the realism of color materials.
Both perceptual possibilities can vary depending on the viewer's perspective.
In his talk, Richter compared his painting to the uncertainty principle established in 1927 by physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg.
According to Heisenberg's insight, the position and velocity of an atomic particle cannot be measured simultaneously and with equal precision.
Any attempt to define one of the two criteria more precisely inevitably introduces uncertainty into the definition of the other.

---「9.
From "Juno and Janus"