Gerhard Richter, the German giant of contemporary art, is changing representation at the age of 90, jumping ship from New York’s Marion Goodman Gallery to join David Zwierner, who has locations in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong. .
“I am delighted to be represented by David Zwirner. I have known David since his childhood because I worked closely with his father, Rudolf Zwierner, in the 1960s,” Richter said in a statement. “I think it shows a beautiful continuity from generation to generation.”
“We are very proud to have represented one of the most remarkable artists of our time for nearly 40 years,” Goodman president and gallery partner Philip Kaiser told Artnet News via email. “We accept his decision at this point in his life.”
A new exclusive presentation of Richter’s work will begin in March 2023 with a solo show at Zwirner’s New York gallery. (In 1994, less than a year after opening his gallery, Zwerner organized a show of the artist’s prints and multiples. Work, followed by solo exhibitions in 2000 and 2004).
By Gerhard Richter Birkenau Cycle (2014). Photo © SPK/photothek.net/Xander Heinl/ © Gerhard Richter 2021.
One of the most successful and celebrated living artists, Richter has achieved success in a wide variety of styles and mediums since the beginning of his career in the 60s, embracing both abstraction and figure and painting as well as photography.
“It is a great honor and a great privilege to be able to work with Gerhard Richter. Richter produced, without a doubt, the most conceptually complex and aesthetically heterogeneous works in the history of art,” Zwerner said in a statement. “Referring to adherence to any one ideology or dogma, Richter celebrated and subverted the act of painting. It has done both. In the process, it has single-handedly opened up entirely new possibilities and avenues of investigation.”
Installation view, “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All”, at Met Breuer, 2020. Photo by Chris Haynes, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Born in Dresden, Germany in 1932, Richter studied art at the Dresden Hochschule für Bildende Kunste in the 1950s and at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf in 1961, after leaving East Germany.
The artist represented Germany at the 1972 Venice Biennale and won the Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997. Richter appeared in a record eight editions of the documentary Kassel, Germany (1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1992, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1992, 1972). 2007, and 2017).
Richter’s long list of institutional solo shows include Center Georges Pompidou, Paris (1977, 2012); Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1988, 2003); Tate Modern, London (1991, 2011); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1993); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002); and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2022). In February, Richter’s native Germany celebrated his 90th birthday with a quartet of solo museum shows.
Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (1986). The piece sold for £30.38 million ($46.35 million) in 2015, the artist’s most expensive work at auction. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s London.
It is also a market star, with an auction record of £30.38 million ($46.35 million) in 2015. Abstraktes Bild (1986) Oil painting at Sotheby’s London, according to the Artnet Price database. (Richter called the price “shocking.”) Die hard that “the whole art market is hopelessly overpriced.”)
Demand for Richter’s work seems to have peaked in the mid-2010s in the wake of his Tate Modern retrospective. It sold $298 million in 2012 and $294 million in 2014, before declining slightly between 2017 and 2020. But annual sales have never fallen below $100 million, and with $247 million in 2021 and $223 million this year, Richter’s third largest auction result was recorded in May. Abstraktes Bild fetching $36.5 million at Christie’s New York.
The artist has spoken of winding down his production in recent years, calling a large commission of stained-glass windows at a monastery in Cologne, where Richter lives and works, his last work in 2020. But his “retirement” from painting in 2017 was short-lived. – lived on, and the artist debuted a show of new works here A foundation boiler in Switzerland this spring.
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