German painter known for his wildly diverse painting styles and subjects. His seeming lack of commitment to a single stylistic direction has often been read as an attack on the implicit ideologies embedded in the specific histories of painting. Such distaste for aesthetic dogma has been interpreted as a response to his early art training in communist East Germany.

Born one year before Adolf Hitler came to power, Richter grew up under the shadow of Nazism and then within East Germany. He studied painting at the Kunstakademie in Dresden from 1952 to 1956 and thereafter became a successful social-realist painter. Granted permission to travel to the West, he was exposed to avant-garde art of the period. In 1961 he entered West Germany, and from 1961 to 1963 he attended the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. There he met Sigmar Polke (Polke, Sigmar), Konrad Lueg (later Konrad Fischer), and Blinky Palermo (an assumed name). Other fellow students embraced such styles as Tachism or Art Informel and such movements as Fluxus, which allowed much personal expression. Richter, however, preferred a more objective approach and, using a projector, began to paint photo-based paintings.

Relying on scenes from newspapers, personal photographs, and magazines, Richter painted the victims of serial killers, portraits of famous European intellectuals, and German terrorists (the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang). His later work includes picturesque landscapes and portraits of his wife and baby, as well as a large body of gestural abstractions of every scale.