Gerhard Richter is a contemporary artist known for his diverse and innovative methods of painting, oscillating between realism and abstraction, and use of photographic sources as the basis of his work.

After graduating from the Dresden Art Academy in 1956, where he trained as a painter, Richter painted murals in the state-dictated Socialist Realist aesthetic. In 1959, he visited documenta II in Kassel and was impressed by the work of the Argentinian-Italian artist Lucio Fontana and American painter Jackson Pollock. Drawn to the possibility of artistic freedom outside East Germany, he defected to West Berlin in 1961 and enrolled in the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. There, he met artists Sigmar Polke and Blinkey Palermo and future art dealer Konrad Leug (later Konrad Fischer), whose shared interest in Pop art led them to found Capitalist Realism in 1963—a satirical critique of Eastern German Socialist Realism and capitalism.

Richter's early paintings from the 1960s are figurative and based on photographic images, a procedure that would continue with his later works. The oil painting Tisch (Table) (1962), for example, began as a realistic portrayal of a white designer table, but the artist was dissatisfied with the result that he covered most of it in bold brushmark. Uncle Rudi (1965), one of his most famous works, is based on a full-length photograph of his uncle in SS uniform. While representational, the black-and-white painting was rendered with a blurring effect that makes it difficult to see the image with certainty.

It was also in 1962 that Ricther began building his vast archive of images. These include photographs, taken by himself or gathered elsewhere, of family members, landscapes, and still lifes; newspaper cuttings, and sketches for his paintings. In the early 1970s, he started exhibiting his archival images as a work of art—as documents of the breadth of his practice—under the title Atlas.

Richter's interest in exploring the tension between photography and painting and between realism and abstraction led him to experiment with a range of methods. For the large-scale diptych Abstraktes Bild (726), for example, he dragged a squeegee over the surface of the paint to smear it. Underneath the overall grey, however, colours of red, white, and orange hint at the possibility of an original, representational image. Other methods include painting directly over pictures, such as in Self Portraits Standing, Three Times, 17.3.1991 (1991), for which Richter applied increasingly more paint on six identical images of himself standing in his studio, so that by the sixth image the original picture would be invisible.

Richter continues to test the threshold between the figurative and the abstract. For Birkenau (2014), a four-part abstract series based on the photographs taken by a Jewish prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1944, Richter made photographic renditions of the images, and painted over them until they became unrecognisable.