Gerhard Richter’s Tulips (1995): ‘It’s about what is missing, that yearning for an ideal image that can never be a reality’

The philosopher Roland Barthes once wrote that photography is ‘tormented by the ghost of painting’. But what happens when a painter is haunted by photography? For more than 60 years, the German artist Gerhard Richter has been in a tense dialogue with the medium, and it has led to an extraordinary body of work.

Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, his early life shaped first by the Second World War, then by the Soviet occupation of East Germany. After studying fine art in Dresden, he could have had a successful career as a Socialist Realist painter. He did not believe in the communist cause, however, and so in 1961 — just before the Berlin Wall was built — he moved to West Germany. At the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf he discovered abstraction and became part of the Pop art-inspired Capitalist Realism movement, which sought to address the divide between Europe’s two competing ideologies.

As is clear from his prodigious output, ranging from abstraction and portraiture to seascapes and colour charts, Richter is not committed to any particular style or genre. This could be a statement of neutrality. ‘I always felt a style is like a diktat,’ he once said. ‘I have a special fear of diktats and style.’

Today, Richter’s most popular works are his photorealist paintings, which he began in the 1960s. They are based on snapshots and newspaper reportage, and painted in his trademark ‘Richter blur’, a technique that involves dragging a dry brush over wet paint to make the image look out of focus or like a badly tuned TV set. The paintings are unsettling, eerie even — there is something uncanny about taking a casual snapshot and placing it in the world of slow and thoughtful looking.

The subjects the artist chooses to paint can often seem banal: apples on a windowsill, fields glimpsed from a passing train, or a family group on the beach. For some, these ordinary, everyday scenes are about the passage of time, each snapshot like the beat of a ticking clock. But for others, Richter’s seeming banality hides a suppressed family narrative, one intricately bound up in Germany’s recent past.

‘I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant,’ says the artist. A painting such as Aunt Marianne (1965), depicting Richter’s aunt, who died as a result of the Nazi euthanasia programme, reminds us that the worst atrocities can be recorded in the same way as a family snapshot.

Dieter Schwarz, co-curator of a forthcoming retrospective of Richter’s work at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, says that the artist thrives on this ambiguity: ‘As a painter, he doesn’t open his heart up to the viewer.’

On 15 October 2025, a photorealist painting by the German artist will be offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s in London. Tulpen (Tulips) (1995) is based on a snapshot of a vase of yellow tulips, and is part of a series that the artist worked on in the 1980s and 1990s, inspired by the golden age of Dutch flower painting.

Richter’s tulips, however, are nothing like a 17th-century still life. The composition is casual and off-kilter, and the unnatural yellow is that of chromogenic print. The fall of light and shade and the blurring suggest a camera lens out of focus. ‘The painting is about looking. He asks us not to believe in it too much,’ says Schwarz.

There is an aggressive quality to the brushwork, as if the artist were trying to wipe the bouquet away. ‘I think Richter found the flowers too beautiful to be true,’ says Schwarz, ‘so in an act of disassociation, he blurs them out.’ It is almost as if Richter is offering the viewer information and obliterating it at the same time.

In 1981, the artist noted the difference between his abstract and figurative paintings, saying, ‘If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes or still lifes show my yearning.’

‘For Richter, the abstracts are about the artist’s ongoing struggle with the material properties of painting,’ says Schwarz, ‘whereas Tulips is about what is missing, that yearning for an ideal image that can never be a reality.’

Before relocating to the West, Richter had had a very formal training at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. ‘He was brought up in this very classical academic world,’ says Schwarz. ‘He was no stranger to the doctrine that paintings were classified into genres.’

The artist has often echoed art-historical motifs in his paintings. Works such as The Reader (1994), which depicts the artist’s wife, are reminiscent of Johannes Vermeer’s luminous portraits, while his ‘Skull’ (1983) and ‘Candle’ (1982-83) series reference 17th-century vanitas still lifes.

In 2017, Richter made his last large-scale abstract canvas, and since then has devoted his career to drawing, working with ink and pencil on paper. What made the artist stop? ‘I remember him saying that blank canvases are a call to action,’ says Schwarz. ‘I think the emotional desire to confront that was just not there any more.’

The forthcoming Paris retrospective, curated by Schwarz and Sir Nicholas Serota, will be one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of the artist’s work. The building has been divided into 37 galleries to accommodate all the different styles and mediums in which Richter has worked.

The surprise for Schwarz has been the artist’s ability to find meaning in the most unexpected of places. ‘There are a few paintings in the show that you think are nothing special, but then you look longer and it’s like an epiphany,’ he says. ‘You realise there is a vital truth there. That is his mastery.’

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online, 8-21 October. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales

Gerhard Richter is at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, from 17 October 2025 to 2 March 2026