Gerhard Richter’s Gift to Berlin Now on Display

The exhibition “Gerhard Richter: 100 Works for Berlin” promises to be a magnet for visitors: Gerhard Richter is one of the most highly regarded contemporary artists in the world. This makes the collection of paintings that the artist gave to the Prussian Foundation for Cultural Heritage in 2021 on permanent loan, just before his 90th birthday, very valuable.

When determining the distribution of his property, the artist left his hometown of Dresden and his hometown of Cologne empty-handed. Richter preferred Berlin, which celebrated the decision as a “sensation”.

The 100 or so works are now on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie and are expected to find a home in the future Museum of the 20th Century.

The present exhibition was developed in close collaboration with the artist.

Focus on the ‘Birkenau’ cycle

Nearly 90 works from various creative phases since the 1980s are on display alongside Richter’s “Birkenau” Holocaust cycle, including photograph-like paintings done with his signature wiping technique, such as “Squatters’ House” (1989), “4,900 Colors” (2007) and “Strip” (2013/2016).

The show also features repainted photographs, in which Richter explored the field of tension between photography and painting.

Richter’s four-part “Birkenau” cycle (2014) — large abstract color canvases crisscrossed with deep gray stripes and complemented by triplets of green and red — take center stage at the Berlin show, however. The works were created from photos secretly taken by a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in August 1944.

‘Picasso of the 21st Century’

Art critics like to refer to Cologne-based Gerhard Richter as the “Picasso of the 21st century.” In fact, the Dresden-born artist is one of the most successful contemporary artists. His museum works are among the most important in the world and reach record sums in the art market. The world showered him with art awards.

Richter shares little more than fame with Picasso, the pioneer of modern art in the 20th century. Although the German artist also loves women and was married three times, unlike the illustrious Spanish artist, Richter shuns the spotlight. He rarely gives interviews and avoids the haunts of the glamorous art world.

What he has in common with Picasso is that he moved from one style to another while other artists were discovering them.

This can be seen through his early Pop Art paintings and early attempts at Abstract Expressionism in the early 1960s, which he declared to be “Capitalist Realism”. It was Richter’s ironic and consumer-critical response to Socialist Realism, the official art doctrine in East Germany at the time.

Richter’s trademark: stylistic disruption

He painted landscapes in the Romantic tradition, cloud and seascape paintings, still lifes and portraits. Richter brought representative painting into the age of photography.

He reinvented himself several times, sometimes with photorealistic representations of nature or blurred paintings, or with glass and mirror objects, installations and repainted photos, as well as large-scale paintings with vivid colors.

Constant stylistic disruption is the hallmark of his art. Few artists have explored the possibilities of painting like 91-year-old Gerhard Richter.

The exhibition “100 Works in Berlin” will be on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie from April 1, 2023 to 2026.

This article was originally written in German.