Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In , he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. Born in Dresden in , Richter is haunted, like many of his German contemporaries, by memories and associations from the Third Reich and the Second World War. Previously indirect in his references to the horror, he has reason to focus on it now, for a show that comes late in his life, and which he says might be the last one of his six-decade career as a chameleon stylist and visual philosopher of painting.
His photographic images transposed to canvas and painterly techniques that exploit chance have often seemed deliberately arbitrary, as if to forswear feeling.
He brings to everything an attitude of radical skepticism. He eventually ended up working in a textile mill in nearby in Zittau, before finding a post as an administrator of a distance learning programme for an educational institution in Dresden. Richter has remarked on his early years with a mixture of fondness and frustration, sadness and excitement.
He reminisced about the house in which he was born, on Grossenhainer Strasse in Dresden: "[it] was not far from the original Circus Sarrasani building, where — as a young boy — I could see the elephant stalls through the cellar windows. I remember my great-grandmother's sewing box, made of armadillo skin, and a man falling from a ladder — something that, according to my parents, only I had seen. I couldn't speak the dialect and so on.
Later, Richter attended grammar school in Zittau but eventually dropped out. He has been described as "a highly gifted child but notoriously bad in school," 9 with Dietmar Elger noting that "he even got poor grades in drawing. While too young to be drafted into the German army during the Second World War, the war nonetheless had a deep impact on Richter.
It was the first presentation of his photo-based painting style. Richter blurred the paintings, modernising traditional art through technique, and using photography as his source of material. In Richter was chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale.
That same year, he exhibited at Documenta in Kassel, where he showed again in , and In Richter began to arrange photographs on panels-snapshots, often banal, clippings from newspapers and magazines, even some pornographic pictures.
These panels became a work in their own right, to which Richter gave the title Atlas. After his first application was rejected, Richter became a sign painter for the Dewag textile plant in Zittau, and eight months later, his second application in was successful.
As a student in Dresden, Richter initially lived with an Aunt outside the city, before settling in an apartment with friends. Living on the same street was Marianne Euffinger, known as Ema, who Richter would go on to marry in Teaching at the academy was strict and rigorous, as Richter learned to make art through the academic copying of plaster casts and nude models. The institution also pushed Socialist Realism, promoting a positive, idealistic vision of East German life.
Richter chose to specialize in mural painting, gaining a number of prominent commissions after graduating. But he was fascinated by life in West Germany, making several trips during the s to Berlin.
With Ema, he moved to West Germany in They chose to settle in Dusseldorf, where Richter began studying at Dusseldorf Academy. There Richter was taught by Joseph Beuys and absorbed ideas relating to the Fluxus movement.
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