Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany. Since the early 1960s he has emerged as one of the essential painters of the postwar period, pioneering photorealism with paintings made from found photographs (amateur snapshots, advertisements and book and magazine illustrations) and then from his own photographs. His work has also profoundly engaged with and influenced such genres as Pop and abstract art. A retrospective of Richter's work was shown in 2001 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition was one of the largest ever organized there for a living artist, and traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Curator Robert Storr has said of the iconic, inscrutable German painter Gerhard Richter, "He's not playing hard to get, he's doing something that is hard to get.'' The difficulty arises from a Conceptualist oeuvre that style-jumps from Photorealism to large, abstract compositions. Martha Schwendener has summed up Richter's contribution by stating, "Seeing Gerhard's abstraction and Photorealism together, you realize that this dual body of work is the perfect expression of what it means to paint today--and what a contemporary master might be." Whatever the style, Richter's subject is always painting itself. Because it features more than 80 works from important private collections, including the artist's own, this monograph provides a unique contextualization of the artist's incredibly influential career, which, spanning more than 40 years, mirrors not only the history of postwar Germany, but also the medium of painting.