Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden, Germany) has spent more than six decades testing what painting can still do in an age dominated by photography, refusing to settle into either photorealism or pure abstraction and treating the tension between them as his true subject.

Richter trained first in East Germany, working on socialist-realist murals as a young painter, before fleeing to the West in 1961, mere months before the Berlin Wall closed the border for good, and enrolling at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. There he began compiling what became Atlas, a growing private archive of found and personal photographs, press clippings, and sketches that he has continued to expand for decades and that supplies the raw material for much of his painting. From this archive came the blurred, photo-based paintings for which he first became known: he projects a photograph onto canvas, traces its outlines, then drags a dry brush across the wet paint to soften and destabilize the image, holding it somewhere between documentary record and its own dissolution.