Gerhard Richter (born 1932 in Dresden) was twelve years old when Allied bombing destroyed his home city in February 1945; he later recalled wandering through the ruins afterward. He trained at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts under the mandatory doctrine of Socialist Realism, the only style East Germany's Communist government permitted. Increasingly certain the regime would only tighten its restrictions, Richter defected to West Berlin in 1961, just weeks before the Wall made such an escape impossible — leaving behind, by his own choice, virtually everything he had painted up to that point.

He resumed his studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he met Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg, and Blinky Palermo. Together with Polke and Lueg, Richter co-founded "Capitalist Realism" in 1963 — a term coined half in earnest, half as a joke aimed at both Socialist Realism and American Pop Art, launched with a one-day exhibition-performance staged inside a Düsseldorf furniture showroom. From this period on, Gerhard Richter worked from an ever-expanding personal archive of found photographs — press images, snapshots, newspaper clippings — that he called Atlas, and that would supply raw material for his paintings for the rest of his career. His figurative photo-paintings translate these sources into blurred, grisaille canvases, the brush dragged across the wet paint to soften edges and destabilise the photograph's claim to objective truth.

In the late 1980s Richter developed the squeegee technique that produced his most recognisable artworks: dragging a length of perspex or wood loaded with paint across the canvas, building up and then partially erasing layers of colour in a process that balances his own control against genuine, unrepeatable chance. That same period produced two of his most significant and starkly different artworks: Betty (1988), a blurred portrait of his daughter turned away from the viewer, and October 18, 1977 (1988), a cycle of fifteen grisaille paintings addressing the deaths of Red Army Faction members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe in a Stuttgart prison — deaths officially ruled suicide, though widely disputed at the time. Richter has said the events "distressed me and haunted me as unfinished business."

The German artist's public commissions extended this range further: in 2007, the city of Cologne unveiled his abstract stained-glass window for the south transept of Cologne Cathedral, generated using a computer algorithm from 11,500 individual squares of colour — a gesture that fused six decades of investigating chance, structure, and image-making with one of Germany's most sacred architectural spaces, from an artist who had once been forbidden to make anything but state-approved realism.

Betty (1988), based on a decade-old photograph of Richter's daughter, shows her turned away from the viewer toward one of his own grey abstract canvases — an artwork often read as a meditation on the limits of both portraiture and painting itself, and among his most reproduced images.

October 18, 1977 (1988), a cycle of fifteen blurred grisaille paintings depicting the Baader-Meinhof prisoners' deaths and their aftermath, remains one of the most discussed and debated bodies of work in postwar German art — history painting rendered so indistinct that it refuses to resolve into simple judgment.

Abstraktes Bild (1986), his auction record at £30.2 million ($46.3 million), exemplifies the squeegee technique at its most fully realised — an abstract artwork built from thick, dragged layers of colour that hold both the memory of the artist's gesture and the accident of what the tool left behind.

The Cologne Cathedral window (2007), generated by computer algorithm from 11,500 coloured glass squares, extended his lifelong investigation of chance and structure onto an architectural scale, in dialogue with eight centuries of the cathedral's own history.

Gerhard Richter has treated editions with a seriousness few major living artists match, extending the same visual language found in his major paintings directly into signed, numbered form. His print catalogue raisonné, compiled by art historian Hubertus Butin — a former Richter studio assistant — documents hundreds of editioned artworks since 1965. His processes range from offset lithography and screenprint to, in later years, technically ambitious "hybrid prints" that translate the physical texture of his squeegee paintings onto paper with startling fidelity.

That demand has produced genuinely striking results: a print from his Abstraktes Bild (724-4) series set the current auction record for a Richter print in 2021, selling for over £1 million — an extraordinary figure for an original, editioned artwork, and confirmation that his art prints are collected as serious extensions of his practice rather than secondary reproductions. Kerze II, a photorealist candle print later adopted as the cover art for Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, set its own record in 2022. In 2023, over 200 limited edition prints by Gerhard Richter sold publicly at auction with an 80% sell-through rate — a market in genuine, sustained demand.

For collectors, Gerhard Richter prints and editions offer direct access to a six-decade investigation of what painting and photography can and cannot show, at prices considerably below his paintings, which now regularly exceed $20 million. Artworks are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou.