Gerhard Richter: Art Documentary

Director:

Gerald Fox

Described by Art Review magazine as the world's most influential and expensive living artist, German painter Gerhard Richter enjoyed enormous success in London with a retrospective exhibition entitled Panorama at Tate Modern in 2011. This film was made a few years ago, when Richter had an equally successful retrospective exhibition at MOMA called "40 Years of Painting," and it covers his entire artistic career. Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power, and later grew up in communist East Germany before fleeing to the West just before the Berlin Wall was built. Since then, he has produced an extensive and diverse body of work, ranging from obscure photograph-based paintings to gigantic abstractions, from Baader Meinhof images to illustrative installations using glass panels. Gerald Fox's film depicts the artist at his home in Cologne, where he was in a phase of quiet reflection and preparation before starting a new series of paintings.