He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction, with him being the most expensive living painter at one time.

[5] Richter was born in Hospital Dresden-Neustadt in Dresden, Saxony,[6] and grew up in Reichenau (now Bogatynia, Poland), and in Waltersdorf (Zittauer Gebirge), in the Upper Lusatian countryside, where his father worked as a village teacher.

[8] When he was 10 years old, Gerhard was conscripted into the Deutsches Jungvolk; the Hitler Youth, for teenage boys, was dissolved at the end of the war, before Richter reached the age of enlistment.

[10] Two brothers of Hildegard died as soldiers in the war and a sister, Gerhard's aunt Marianne, who had schizophrenia, was starved to death in a pyschiatric clinic, a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program.

During this time, he worked intensively on murals like Arbeiterkampf (Workers' struggle), on oil paintings (e.g. portraits of the East German actress Angelica Domröse and of Richter's first wife Ema), on various self-portraits, and on a panorama of Dresden with the neutral name Stadtbild (Townscape, 1956).

[14] In West Germany, Richter began to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz, together with Sigmar Polke, Werner Hilsing, HA Schult,[15] Kuno Gonschior, Franz Erhard Walther, Konrad Lueg, and Gotthard Graubner.

[16][17] With Polke and Konrad Fischer [de] (pseudonym Lueg), he introduced the term Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalistic Realism)[18][19] as an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial shorthand of advertising.

[21] Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on a variety of sources: newspapers and books, sometimes incorporating their captions, (as in Helga Matura (1966)); private snapshots; aerial views of towns and mountains, (Cityscape Madrid (1968) and Alps (1968)); seascapes (1969–70); and a large multipart work made for the German Pavilion in the 1972 Venice Biennale.

[26] He has explored a variety of photographic printmaking processes – screenprint, photolithography, and collotype – in search of inexpensive mediums that would lend a "non-art" appearance to his work.

The work has continued to expand, and was exhibited later in full form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1989, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1990, and at Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1995.

Richter was flying to New York on 11 September 2001, but due to the 9/11 attacks, including on the World Trade Center, his plane was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

He considers how the ubiquitous photographic documentation of 11 September attacks affects the uniqueness of one's distinct remembrance of the events, and he offers a valuable comparison to Richter's 18 October 1977 cycle.

In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of non-representational painting, beginning with brushing big swaths of primary color onto canvas.

[47] Richter's abstract work and its illusion of space developed out of his incidental process: an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving, and subtracting paint.

[49] Firenze consists of small paintings bearing images of the city of Florence, created by the artist as a tribute to the music of Steve Reich and the work of Contempoartensemble, a Florence-based group of musicians.

Working on a long table over a period of several weeks, Richter combined these 10 x 15 cm details with 165 texts on the Iraq war, published in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on 20 and 21 March.

The resulting November sheets are regarded as a significant departure from his previous watercolours in that the pervasive soaking of ink into wet paper produced double-sided works.

Richter's 4900 Colours from 2007 consisted of bright monochrome squares that have been randomly arranged in a grid pattern to create stunning fields of kaleidoscopic color.

[62] Arranged in two rooms, Richter presented an ensemble of paintings and colored mirrors in a special pavilion designed in collaboration with architect Paul Robbrecht at Documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992.

[78] An additional 34 figurative stained glass windows designed for the abbey by Afghan-German Muslim artist Mahbuba Maqsoodi are expected to be completed by Easter 2021.

In 1993, he received a major touring retrospective "Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962–1993" curated by Kasper König, with a three volume catalogue edited by Benjamin Buchloh.

[44] Richter became known to a U.S. audience in 1990, when the Saint Louis Art Museum circulated Baader-Meinhof (18 October 1977), a show that that was later seen at the Lannan Foundation in Marina del Rey, California.

[82] In 2006, an exhibition at the Getty Center connected the landscapes of Richter to the Romantic pictures of Caspar David Friedrich, showing that both artists "used abstraction, expansiveness, and emptiness to express transcendent emotion through painting.

[85] The first major exhibition of his work in Australia, Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images, was mounted by the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane from 14 October 2017 to 4 February 2018.

Although Richter gained popularity and critical praise throughout his whole career, his fame burgeoned during his 2005 retrospective exhibition, which declared his place among the most important artists of the 20th century.

[109] Richter's paintings have been flowing steadily out of Germany since the mid-1990s even as certain important German collectors – Frieder Burda, Josef Fröhlich, Georg Böckmann, and Ulrich Ströher – have held on to theirs.

[111] In February 2008, Christie's London set a first record for Richter's "capitalist realism" pictures from the 1960s by selling the painting Zwei Liebespaare (1966) for £7,300,500 ($14.3 million)[112] to Stephan Schmidheiny.

[35] In 2010, the Weserburg modern art museum in Bremen, Germany, decided to sell Richter's 1966 painting Matrosen (Sailors) in a November auction held by Sotheby's, where John D. Arnold[68] bought it for $13 million.

[116] In November 2011, Sotheby's sold a group of colorful abstract canvases by Richter, including Abstraktes Bild 849-3, which made a record price for the artist at auction when Lily Safra[117] paid $20.8 million[118] only to donate it to the Israel Museum afterwards.

The later work in turn is part of a larger two-section collaboration, Reich Richter Pärt which was commissioned for the inaugural season at The Shed in the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan in New York City.