Gerhard Richter is a contemporary German painter considered among the most influential living artists. Richter’s experiments with abstraction and photo-based painting greatly contributed to the history of the medium. Culling from his vast image archive known as the Atlas, Richter’s paintings reference images of his daughter Betty, flickering candles, aerial photographs, portraits of criminals, and pastoral landscapes. “Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form,” he reflected. “And the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context.” Born on February 9, 1932 in Dresden, Germany during the rise of the Nazi regime. After World War II, living in East Germany under...