Gerhard Richter

German painter Gerhard Richter is often considered one of the most important of post-World War II artists. He is probably Germany's greatest 20th Century painterly export, and certainly its most expensive.

Broadly speaking, Richter's oeuvre may be divided between photorealism and abstraction. He works initially from photos - either ones he has found or ones he has taken himself which are then projected onto the canvass. One of the defining characteristics of the finished works is the "blur", which produces a kind of soft-focus effect. The more blur, the more his work veers towards abstraction.

With some noting an affinity with Minimalism, there is something quite intriguingly boring about Richter's work as a kind of eerie flat blankness pervades.

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