Oil on cardboard
Dated "V. 60" lower right. 83,5 x 59 cm (32,8 x 23,2 in)

Accompanied by a writing (in copy) from Dr. Dietmar Elger, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden - Gerhard Richter Archive, dated 24 April 2007.

PROVENANCE: Private collection Southern Germany (acquired in a Dresden art shop in 1961).

After his studies of painting in Dresden from 1952 to 1957 and the three years that followed as a master-class student at the Academy, Richter emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany. A large cache of early work, long believed to have been lost, dates from that period. Only a few of these works have survived.

Gerhard Richter keeps a list of his own works, which he demonstratively began with number '1' in 1962. In the fertile environment of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he studied from 1961 to 1963 under Karl Otto Götz and became friends with Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo and Konrad Lueg (later known as the gallery owner Konrad Fischer), Richter began creating an artistic identity of his own. Nevertheless, the work Richter did in Dresden is also interseting because even before his academy experience, essential characteristics of Richter as a painter occur in recognizable form: the 'dressing' theme anticipates his later intimate family portraits. A pastose application of paint, which leads a life of its own within the stringent composition, contributing substantially to the overall impact made by the picture, would become the dominant theme of the abstract compositions of the late 1970s. In his early student period, Richter oriented himself towards Renato Guttoso, Pablo Picasso and Jean Dubuffet, taking full advantage of whatever he could within the possibilities afforded by the constricting GDR art dogma. Through the field of vision he has chosen to frame, Richter has succeeded in lending the present picture a mood of intimacy despite the formally brittle and rough handling. It is this very blend of closeness and distance, of what is seemingly familiar and what is artificial that is so fascinating about Gerhard Richter and this quality is already apparent in our picture.

His first solo exhibitions took place in 1964 at the galleries of Heiner Friedrich in Munich and Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf. In 1971 he was offered a chair at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, which he held until 1996. In 1997 his 'Atlas' - a systematic collection of photographs and painted sketches - was exhibited at the documenta X in Kassel. Today Gerhard Richter is regarded as one of the internationally best known and most successful contemporary artists, whose works are appreciated by a wide audience on numerous exhibitions. [KR].