MADRID.- Fundación Telefónica presents the personal project of one of the greatest creators of the XX century, made of more than 300 painted pictures coming from his personal albums. The show includes images from private collections and from the artist himself on which Richter has worked since 1989 until the present.

Gerhard Richter is considered one of the most influential artists of our time without ever having limited himself to one single style. His varied production includes sculptures and paintings that range from landscapes to colourist abstractions and monochromatic greys.

Richter has initiated a fruitful dialogue between painting and photography that has resulted in his painted photographs, small-format images taken during his travels, walks or within his own home. Those images that do not fit within his personal album due to their lack of specificity or focus or for being duplicates are subsequently painted. Dragging the photos over wet paint, Richter creates new images. The images that compose the Overpainted Photographs exhibition come from private collections and the artist’s own collection, and they reflect the intensity and perseverance with which Richter has worked on this project from 1989 to the present day.

Gerhard Richter (Dresden, Germany, 1932) was trained in the Dresden and Dusseldorf art academies and learned photography as a laboratory technician. At the end of the nineteen sixties, he worked together with artists such as Polke and Baselitz, forming what was called Capitalist Realism. Following his first exhibition in 1963, he has received prizes such as the Junger Westen, Arnold Bode and Oskar Kokoschka awards. Furthermore, in 1972 he represented Germany in the Venice Biennale and participated in the Kassel Documentas of 1977, 1982 and 1987. In 2001, the MoMA organised Richter’s first large retrospective Forty Years of Painting.