East German painter, born in Dresden. 1951-56 Studied at the Kunstakademie Dresden. Trained as a Social Realist, he found, after moving to the West, that he could make challenging work and still maintain his sense of craft by painting photographs. In 1961, moved to Düsseldorf, and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1961-63. In 1964 painted his first pictures based on magazine photographs and snapshots. Later, in 1968, he began a series of large-format abstract paintings with great intensity of colour. Concurrently he also painted conventional looking landscapes that were self-evidently photographic in origin. The extreme variety of Richter's work left him open to criticism, but his rejection of an artificially maintained consistency of style was a conscious conceptual act that allowed him to investigate freely the basic principles of painting. In 1991, important retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London and in 1993 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and in the Kunst und Austellungshalle des Bundersrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, in 1993-94. 1997 Participation in "Documenta" 5.
