GERHARDT RICHTER (German, born 1932) Untitled (No. 552-1), 1984 oil on canvas, 102 3/8 x 78 3/4" Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 2000.

Born in Dresden, Germany in 1932, Gerhardt Richter is one of the preeminent European painters working today. He began making art at the age of sixteen in the social realist style of communist-dominated East Germany. After moving to Dusseldorf in 1960 where he was introduced to the ideas of the European avant-garde, his life as an artist was transformed. Since that time he has pursued his ideas by working in many styles from abstract to representational.

In order to fully understand Richter’s art, one must look at more than a single painting because he freely moves from making gestural abstractions such as this one, to painting landscapes and still lifes in a super realist style, to creating abstract works that are painted in a realistic style. (Such works are known as the "smooth abstract paintings," an example is in the Gallery’s collection, Untitled (no. 418), 1977).

This work, from the mid-1980s, is one of Richter’s abstract paintings dominated by spontaneous gesture and rich color. It is one of Richter’s so-called “free abstract paintings”. In this series, the artist begins with a background color and then adds to it. While the painting appears unplanned, it is in fact the result of the artist’s careful deliberation. As Richter describes it, “I control the spontaneous.”

- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects