Photograph: Benjamin Katz, Gerhard Richter, Germany 1984/1991 © DACS 2025
With a career spent traversing photography, painting, and print, Gerhard Richter has captivated audiences for over six decades. Amid the recent buzz stirred by the opening of the monumental Richter retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, Phillips will offer a selection of Richter’s most sought-after works in our Evening & Day Editions Sale in London on 22 and 24 January 2026.
From well-loved photographic memorabilia like Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi) to the abstract painterly marks of Haggadah, this collection of prints showcases Richter’s definitive mastery of mediums and styles, and also highlights the deliberate ambiguity of his artistic approach. Having famously rejected his formal training at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Richter’s polemical outlook is distilled in his practice, eradicating instruction and instead leaving room for viewers to form their own thoughts and relationships to his art. By embracing this uncertainty, Richter’s editions serve as a testament to his relentless exploration and redefinition of artistic tradition.
It was in 1963, following his escape from East to West Germany before the construction of the Berlin Wall, that Richter began amassing a number of photographs that would later be known as Atlas; a compendium of source material used for his prints. Disillusioned with the ability of painting to capture reality, Richter announced he “had had enough of bloody painting.” The artist set aside his paintbrushes to instead explore the fertile ground between mediums, blurring the boundaries between photography, painting, and print.
Gerhard Richter, Orchidee II (Orchid II), 1998. Evening & Day Editions London.
Playing with Perception
Richter’s 1998 Orchidee II captures this deliberate, delicate disillusion. Richter conceals a multi-step, multi-medium process within a single print — the offset lithograph is based on a photograph of Richter’s oil painting Orchidee from the year prior, which was itself based on an earlier photograph of the flower taken by the artist. Interrogating the idea of representational originality, the image’s distanced relationship to reality is revealed through its gentle haze. The delicate blooms reverberate in and out of focus, evoking a sense of uncertainty as we allow ourselves to be enraptured by the simultaneous layering of mediums. In this ambiguity, Richter explores art historical legacies where traditional still life painters used the medium to meticulously depict reality, and early twentieth-century photographers vindicated the camera’s unbiased eye. This work is not an attempt at faithful reproduction, but rather a layered ensemble wherein each of Richter’s memories attach to each of the three stages of Orchidee II’s rendition. Blurring the boundaries between original and copy, past and present, Richter invites contemplation on the fluidity of artistic creation and the ever-shifting nature of perception.
I like things that are indeterminate and boundless, and I like persistent uncertainty.
—Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter, Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi), 2000. Evening & Day Editions London.
Historial Hesitance
An artist who enjoys the overlap between different mediums, Richter also explores the hinterlands of cultural and personal history. Onkel Rudi was conceived from diving into his personal archive of family albums. Depicted in his Wehrmacht coat — the uniform worn by Nazi soldiers — Richter employs his signature blur technique to create distance between himself and the heirloom. Indeed, while a touching ode to his maternal uncle, Onkel Rudi is also an exploration into Germany’s Post-War cultural amnesia. Lying between a deeply personal and historical confrontation of responsibility, Onkel Rudi is a vehicle through which Richter confronts Germany’s collective accountability — and the uncertain path to heal the open wounds of recent human atrocity.
Clockwise from top left: Gerhard Richter, Guildenstern, 1998. Gerhard Richter, Cage 4, 2006/2020. Gerhard Richter, Ophelia, 1998. Evening & Day Editions London.
Mystifying Material
Rather than journeying from photography to painting to print, Guildenstern and Ophelia reverse the trajectory. Capturing a detail of lacquer, oil paint, and water from his initial 1977 painting, Richter draws on the element of chance involved in the paintings’ creation, as the liquids morphed and swelled to produce a marbled effect. Richter explores the notion of the sole artist as a genius by removing the artist’s hand and insinuating the autonomy of the medium, thereby circumventing authorship. This intention was extended further in his 2006 Cage Paintings, for which he fashioned a squeegee from a Perspex bar. The cumbersome apparatus enabled the artist to slide thick layers of paint in vertical and horizontal directions, thereby experimenting with erasure and the serendipitous collision of colour. By digitally printing the original paintings after their creation, Richter further erases individualism through the process of mechanical reproduction and deconstructs the binaries of machine predictability and mercurial nature of paint.
Left: Gerhard Richter, Domecke I (Cathedral Corner I), 1998. Evening & Day Editions London. Right: Gerhard Richter, Kreuz (Cross), 1997. Evening & Day Editions London.
Religious Reservations
Richter’s ambiguity extends beyond his immediate practice and into his relationship with faith: despite his Christian upbringing, the artist is adamantly agnostic — perhaps in both artistic and religious sentiment — overlaying the sacred with secular ideology. Domecke I is another of Richter’s photograph-cum-painting-cum prints, displaying the buttress of the cathedral awash in brilliant white light. Richter was drawn to the exchange between the transitory and permanent, caught between the material (the cathedral) and immaterial (the light). In remaining non-committal, Richter gained permission to create works infused with unabashed spirituality, using art to grapple with concepts traditionally reserved for religion. His creative aptitude — merging paint, print, and photography – has produced conceptually challenging works that substantiate and expand the deep-seated yearning for spiritual understanding in a distinctly modern age of digital media and artificial intelligence.
Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God [...] The ability to believe is our most outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality.
—Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter, Seestück (Gegenlicht) (Seascape [Backlight]), 1969/1991. Evening & Day Editions London.
Where artists have long grappled with whether a two-dimensional image can ever capture reality, Richter shows us that it is art’s inherent subjectivity — or rather, its ability to provoke uncertainty — that is the most real of all. Richter’s editions transcend traditional media classifications, creating a unique dialogue that challenges our understanding of art and history. Whilst at times elusive, the crux of Richter’s lifelong practice lies in his ability to play with the viewer. By examining his meticulous multi-step, multi-media process, Richter encourages us to question what we see, how much is predetermined, and how we treat our past. Tackling subject matter ranging from the everyday, the abstract, and the deeply personal, what is certain is that Richer’s art is unmistakably undefinable — and that is where his best examples lie.