The erasure as revelation: Gerhard richter or the art of painting the invisible
Imagine a canvas where a young girl in a red dress turns her back to the viewer. Her face is blurred, as if seen through a fogged-up window. Yet this is not a photograph, but an oil painting, executed with almost surgical precision. This work, Betty (1988), encapsulates Gerhard Richter’s paradox: the more he erases, the more he reveals. In his Cologne studio, the German artist spent six decades exploring this fragile boundary between presence and absence, memory and forgetting, reality and illusion. His brush does not capture light—it dissolves it.
By Artedusa
••8 min readRichter is not a painter in the traditional sense. He is an archaeologist of the image, an alchemist who transforms photographic mud into pictorial gold. His canvases do not represent the world; they expose its scars. When he paints Uncle Rudi (1965)—his relative in a Nazi uniform—it is not to denounce or glorify, but to show how history freezes in an image, then distorts over time. The blur is not a technical accident, but a metaphor: that of a Germany struggling to face its past.
To understand Richter, one must accept an unsettling truth: his greatest works are those where he seems to have done the least. Those vast gray expanses that resemble bare walls? They are landscapes of the soul. Those colorful abstractions where paint flows like lava? Archives of gestures, where every trace is both a confession and a lie. Richter does not paint what he sees. He paints what he cannot see.
01The broken mirror of Germany
Dresden, 1956. A twenty-four-year-old man completes his training at the Academy of Fine Arts. He has just painted Lebensfreude (Joy of Life), a mural depicting workers and peasants in a heroic style, conforming to the canons of socialist realism. Four years later, this same man will cross the border clandestinely to flee East Germany. In Düsseldorf, he will burn his early drawings and embark on a career that will make him the most expensive German artist in the world.
This rupture is not merely geographical. It is ontological. In East Germany, Richter learned to paint ideals. In the West, he discovered that painting could be a question, not an answer. His first Western works, like Table (1962), are photographic still lifes, rendered with clinical coldness. But soon, something goes awry. The outlines blur. The faces fade. As if the artist, having left a regime built on state lies, had lost the ability to represent anything clearly.
This ambiguity is not a style. It is a necessity. In post-war Germany, truth is a rare commodity. When Richter paints Aunt Marianne (1965)—his aunt, schizophrenic, sterilized, then murdered by the Nazis—he does not seek to reconstruct her face. He blurs it, as if to suggest that certain sufferings cannot be shown or erased. The canvas becomes a palimpsest: beneath the layers of paint, one glimpses the traces of a crime no one wants to see.
02Photography, that impossible model
Richter has never hidden his obsession with photography. "It is the most perfect medium," he once said. Yet he spends his life betraying it. His photo-paintings are not copies, but autopsies. Take Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (1966), inspired by a photograph of his first wife. The canvas is so smooth it looks like a color photograph. But look closer: the steps of the staircase are distorted, as if seen through a faulty lens. Ema’s body seems to float in an unreal space. Richter does not reproduce the photo—he exposes its flaws.
This approach reaches its peak with October 18, 1977 (1988), a series of fifteen canvases depicting members of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof) who died in prison. The images, taken from newspapers, are so blurred that the faces are barely distinguishable. Some critics saw this as an attempt at neutrality. In reality, it is the opposite. By obscuring the details, Richter forces the viewer to see what they would rather ignore: state violence, media manipulation, the way history becomes legend.
What fascinates about Richter is his ability to turn imperfection into a language. His blurs are not mistakes, but revelations. They say: "Here is an image. Here is what it hides. Here is what you do not want to see." In a world saturated with smooth, retouched images, his canvases act like broken mirrors.
03Abstraction as a field of ruins
By the late 1970s, Richter gradually abandons figuration. Not out of weariness, but because he has exhausted the possibilities of the visible. His abstractions, like Abstract Painting (599) (1986)—sold for $46 million in 2015—represent nothing, and that is precisely what makes them so powerful.
In his studio, Richter works like a geologist. He spreads layers of oil paint, then scrapes them away with a squeegee, revealing the strata beneath. Sometimes, he uses a dry brush to soften the edges. Other times, he lets the paint flow like water. The result evokes landscapes seen from a plane, topographic maps, or X-rays of a sick body. But it is only an illusion. These canvases are, above all, archives of gestures—traces of a struggle between the artist and the material.
What strikes in these works is their contained violence. Richter does not seek harmony. He digs, scrapes, tears. As if he wanted to extract something from the paint itself. In Grey (1974), a monochrome canvas where shades of gray overlap, one can make out the scars of the tools used. These marks are not decorative. They are the stigmata of a battle.
For Richter, abstraction is not an escape, but a confrontation. His canvases are not windows onto another world. They are walls—surfaces where the traces of time, memory, and forgetting are inscribed.
04Glass, or the art of showing nothing
In 1967, Richter created 4 Panes of Glass, a work composed of four transparent panes mounted on hinges. Nothing is painted. Nothing is represented. Yet this piece is one of the most radical of his career.
Glass fascinates Richter because it is both present and absent. It reflects, distorts, lets light pass through. In 7 Standing Panes (2002), seven colored glass panels are arranged in a circle. Depending on the angle, the reflections change, the colors mix, and the viewer becomes both actor and subject of the work. These pieces are not sculptures. They are optical experiments—meditations on transparency and opacity.
This obsession with glass reveals a fundamental truth about Richter’s art: he does not believe in representation. For him, a work should not show, but suggest. Glass, like blur, is a filter. It does not hide. It reveals what is already there—light, space, the viewer’s gaze.
In an interview, Richter said: "I do not want to paint pictures. I want to paint questions." His glass works are the culmination of this quest. They answer nothing. They invite us to look differently.
05The studio as a laboratory of ambiguity
Richter’s studio in Cologne is an austere, almost monastic place. No garish colors, no creative chaos. Just a large wooden table, shelves filled with paint jars, and canvases in progress. The artist works in near-religious silence, often listening to Bach or Beethoven.
What strikes is the rigor of his method. For his photo-paintings, he begins by projecting an image onto the canvas, which he traces in pencil. Then he applies oil paint, spreading and blurring it with various tools—brushes, squeegees, sometimes even his fingers. For his abstractions, he layers colors, then partially removes them, like an archaeologist uncovering fossils.
This methodical approach contrasts with the final result, which often seems random. In reality, nothing is left to chance. Every gesture is calculated, every effect controlled. Richter does not seek accident. He seeks ambiguity—that moment when an image tips between figuration and abstraction, between memory and forgetting.
In the 2000s, he even incorporated digital tools into his process. For his Strip series (2011–2014), he scanned details of his own abstract canvases, then stretched and duplicated them endlessly. The result evokes digital landscapes, or fabric patterns. But here again, Richter blurs the lines. Are these paintings? Prints? Algorithms?
06The legacy of a painter who was not one
Today, Richter is ninety-two years old. His work, exhibited in the world’s greatest museums, continues to fascinate and divide. Some see a conceptual genius, others an opportunist who rode the trends. But one thing is certain: no one has pushed the exploration of painting’s limits further.
His influence is everywhere. In the blurred canvases of Marlene Dumas, who blurs the line between portrait and memory. In the abstractions of Julie Mehretu, where layers of paint evoke geopolitical maps. In the installations of Olafur Eliasson, which play with light and perception.
Yet Richter remains a case apart. Unlike Warhol, who celebrated mass culture, or Bacon, who explored the abysses of the psyche, he has always refused labels. His art is neither political nor apolitical. Neither figurative nor abstract. Neither beautiful nor ugly. It simply is necessary.
In a world where images have become commodities, where truth is often a matter of filters, Richter reminds us of something essential: art should not show what is, but what is missing. His canvases are not windows. They are scars. And that is precisely why they touch us.