Gerhard Richter stands as one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in contemporary art, defying easy categorization throughout his remarkable six-decade career. The German master has continuously evolved from blurry photorealism to chaotic abstraction, leaving an indelible mark on modern painting that resonates with artists worldwide. His profound impact on contemporary art is currently being celebrated across Paris through two major exhibitions that showcase the full breadth of his artistic evolution.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton is presenting a comprehensive retrospective of Richter's work running through March 2, 2026, featuring 275 works spanning from 1962 to 2024. Simultaneously, David Zwirner is hosting a solo exhibition of the artist's pieces through December 20th. These parallel shows underscore why Richter's artistic practice remains vital and relevant to today's art world.
Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932, Richter's formative years were shaped by the devastation of the world wars. He initially studied under the restrictive Socialist Realism style before making a pivotal decision to flee East Germany in 1961, just months before the Berlin Wall's construction. This westward move opened new avenues for artistic experimentation that would define his entire career.
Richter's artistic journey demonstrates remarkable versatility and constant reinvention. His Photo Paintings of the 1960s presented haunting, blurred black-and-white images that evoked ghostly memories. By the early 1970s, he transitioned to representational painting, most notably creating the 48 Portraits—photorealistic head paintings for the 1972 Venice Biennale. The 1980s saw him develop his iconic squeegee abstractions, where he dragged, scraped, and layered paint in a physical struggle with color. He even temporarily abandoned traditional painting to explore glass sculptures and digitally rendered Strip images.
Richter's capacity for constant reinvention makes it challenging to find artists who perfectly mirror his approach, yet it also demonstrates the far-reaching influence of his work. Here are seven contemporary artists that admirers of Richter should definitely explore.
Vija Celmins, the Latvian-American artist born in 1938, has dedicated over five decades to meticulously rendering ocean surfaces, night skies, and desert landscapes using graphite and oil. Working exclusively from black-and-white photographs, she reproduces every ripple and grain of light by hand in a painstaking process that can take months for a single drawing. Her devotion to capturing stillness parallels Richter's photo-based paintings, as both artists transform mechanical images into intimate, tactile experiences. Her 1977 piece "Untitled (Ocean)" masterfully captures endless ocean ripples in graphite, creating sublime stillness reminiscent of Richter's seascapes. The connection between their work was formally recognized when the Guggenheim Bilbao exhibited their series together in 2019.
British painter Katy Moran, born in Manchester in 1975, begins her works on small square canvases over original images—often cropped internet pictures or magazine clippings. She systematically reworks these base images until they disappear beneath frantic layers of paint. Her improvisational, stop-and-start process mirrors Richter's squeegee paintings, as both artists use speed and revision to allow chance to interrupt their compositions. Works like "Heartset (assimilation)" (2023) showcase her animated brushmarks, drips, and smudges, while "How to Paint Like an athlete" (2023) demonstrates her intensely physical approach to painting.
Jack Whitten, who lived from 1939 to 2018, pioneered material abstraction by replacing traditional brushes with rakes, Afro combs, and custom-built tools to drag pigment into dense color fields. In the 1980s, he began casting slabs of acrylic paint, then cutting and reassembling them into mosaic-like compositions. His physical, accumulative process mirrors Richter's late abstractions, where scraping and layering transform the surface into a record of artistic experimentation. His 1974 work "Chinese Sincerity" demonstrates this technique through horizontal drags of red and violet pigment, creating striated traces that bear the marks of each tool movement.
Æmen Ededéen, born in Idaho in 1979 and currently working in New Mexico, began his career creating overtly political art before shifting toward a more intuitive abstract practice. He now creates atmospheric canvases using thin oil glazes and mixed-media layers that accumulate into luminous surfaces. His recent paintings draw inspiration from randomly chosen book pages, translating chance connections into dreamlike, layered scenes where ghostly figures emerge and fade amid swirling colors. Works like "The Garden is Trembling but the Dreamer is Still" (2025) feature bright, unexpected color contrasts that recall Richter's Cage-inspired paintings.
Colombian-born Oscar Murillo shares Richter's appetite for visual disorder and material experimentation. His canvases often incorporate unconventional materials, stitching together bags or drop cloths, and even when working on traditional canvas, he mirrors the energy of Richter's scraped abstractions. His 2014 work "MILK CHOCOLATE" features linen pieces stitched onto dirt-covered canvas marked with various blue oil paints, demonstrating his attention to the physicality of materials. Murillo's approach echoes Richter's methodology, where the creative process becomes as important as the finished artwork.
Sandi Haber Fifield, born in Ohio in 1956, creates unique works that splice photography with painting. Her Lineations series combines reprinted and manipulated photographs with graphite and ink on translucent vellum, collapsing traditional boundaries between drawing and photographic image. This approach mirrors Richter's use of photographs to demonstrate how seeing is an active process built through change and reconsideration. A self-proclaimed "huge Richter fan," Fifield treats photographs as images in progress, where final results remain uncertain and require active viewer engagement.
Finally, Berlin-based Johannes Kahrs, born in Bremen in 1965, paints film stills, news images, and snapshots using thin oil washes, dragging paint across surfaces to create faces and bodies that appear half-erased. The resulting blur creates psychological unease, as though images are retreating while being observed. This effect connects directly to Richter's 1960s photo paintings, where memory's soft focus becomes the true subject. His 2006 work "Moongirl," depicting a woman in motion blur and blue light, exemplifies this technique of presenting images as if they're already disappearing.
These seven artists, while each maintaining their unique artistic voices, share Richter's fundamental questioning of how we perceive and process images. They continue his legacy of refusing to let images resolve cleanly, instead embracing doubt, experimentation, and the physical act of making art as essential components of contemporary artistic practice.
