Gerhard Richter doesn’t fit neatly into a box. Across more than six decades, the German artist painted and sculpted his way out of every category, shifting from blurry photorealism to chaotic abstraction. His influence on contemporary painting is impossible to overstate: Artists still borrow his sense of doubt, his fascination with perception, and perhaps most importantly, his refusal to let images resolve cleanly.
Richter’s colossal impact is now being celebrated across Paris. The Fondation Louis Vuitton is currently presenting a major retrospective for the artist through March 2, 2026, tracing the full arc of his career across landmark and lesser-known works. The show will feature 275 works from 1962 to 2024. Just across the city, David Zwirner is staging a solo exhibition for the artist through December 20th. Together, the two shows remind viewers why Richter’s practice is still so important.
Born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, Richter came of age amid the ruins of the world wars. He studied under the rigid style of Socialist Realism before fleeing East Germany in 1961—just months before the Berlin Wall went up. The move west opened the door to experimentation, a practice that he continued for his entire life.
Richter’s “Photo Paintings” of the 1960s presented blurred black-and-white images that evoke ghostly recollections. By the early 1970s, he started working on representational painting, perhaps most notably the “48 Portraits,” photorealistic paintings of heads created for the 1972 Venice Biennale. By the 1980s, his squeegee abstractions, in which he dragged, scraped, and layered paint, turned color into a physical struggle. He even abandoned his painting practice altogether for a number of years to create glass sculptures and digitally rendered “Strip” images.
Gerhard Richter, Lesende [Femme lisant], 1994. Courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Richter is known for his capacity for reinvention. That makes it hard to find artists who truly fit in his mold—but it also shows how far his influence has spread. Here are seven artists that fans of Richter should know.
B. 1938, Riga, Latvia. Lives and works in New York City.
Latvian American artist Vija Celmins has spent over five decades painstakingly rendering the surfaces of oceans, night skies, and desertscapes in graphite and oil. Working from black-and-white photographs, she reproduces every ripple and grain of light by hand, a process that can take months for a single drawing. Her devotion to stillness parallels Richter’s photo-based paintings: Both artists translate the mechanical image into something intimate and tactile.
Many of the scenes are derived from photographs that Celmins takes herself. One oceanscape, Untitled (Ocean) (1977), deftly captures the endless ripples of the moving ocean in a graphite drawing on paper. The sublime stillness Celmins captures calls to mind Richter’s seascapes, and the two artists’ series were shown together by Guggenheim Bilbao in 2019. In particular, Richter’s SEASCAPE (GREEN-GREY, CLOUDY) [SEESTÜCK (GRÜNGRAU, BEWÖLKT)] (1969) depicts the subtle ocean ripples that extend to a seemingly endless horizon.
Celmins immigrated to the United States in the late 1940s. She attended the John Herron Art Institute in Indiana and studied at Yale University before moving to Los Angeles in 1962 to pursue a master’s degree at UCLA. Switzerland’s Fondation Beyeler mounted a retrospective for the artist earlier this year from June 15th to September 21st.
B. 1975, Manchester, England. Lives and works in Hertfordshire, England.
British painter Katy Moran starts her works on small square canvases on top of an original image—often a cropped picture found on the internet or torn out of a magazine. She reworks the image until it disappears beneath frantic layers of paint. Moran’s improvisational, stop-and-start process recalls Richter’s squeegee paintings; both use speed and revision to let chance interrupt composition.
Moran’s brushmarks, drips, and smudges animate works like Heartset (assimilation) (2023). Her impulsive mark-making recalls Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (648-2) (1987), where dense sweeps of color are broken by sudden, resistant patches. How to Paint Like an Athlete (2023), for instance, shows Moran’s physical approach to painting. Each swipe and drag of color feels like a test of strength and motion, recalling Richter’s athletic gestures across the canvas.
An alum of the Royal College of Art, Moran is represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery and Sperone Westwater. Her solo exhibitions have been presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and Tate St. Ives, among others. Pippy Houldsworth Gallery mounted her most recent solo show in London earlier this year.
B. 1939, Bessemer, Alabama. D. 2018, New York City.
A pioneer of material abstraction, Jack Whitten replaced the brush with rakes, Afro combs, and later custom-built “developer” tools to drag pigment into dense color fields. In the 1980s, he began casting slabs of acrylic paint, cutting and reassembling them into mosaic-like fields. His physical, accumulative process mirrors Richter’s late abstractions, in which scraping and layering turn the surface into a record of experimentation.
In Chinese Sincerity (1974), Whitten drags red and violet pigment horizontally across the canvas, leaving behind striated traces where the acrylic gathers and thins. The surface bears the marks of each pull—the ridged edges, the faint vertical seams where the tool lifts. Meanwhile, Richter’s Mohre [Carotte] (1984) achieves a similar density through vertical sweeps of color, where the squeegee compresses and scrapes away paint to reveal shifting layers beneath.
Whitten was the subject of “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” presented by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This retrospective, which closed on August 2nd, examined 60 years of Whitten’s career through 175 paintings.
B. 1979, Elmore County, Idaho. Lives and works in Placitas, New Mexico.
Æmen Ededéen began his career making overtly political art. In recent years, however, the New Mexico–based artist has shifted toward a more intuitive practice, creating abstract canvases built using thin oil glazes and mixed-media layers that accumulate into luminous, atmospheric surfaces.
Many of Ededèen’s new paintings draw ideas from randomly chosen book pages to guide his work, translating those chance connections into dreamlike, densely layered scenes where ghostly figures seem to surface and fade amid swirling purples, greens, and rust tones, as in The Garden is Trembling but the Dreamer is Still (2025). The fields of color, often bursting with bright, unexpected contrasts, recall Richter’s “Cage” paintings (inspired by John Cage) in their sense of layered motion and luminous depth.
Ededéen’s solo exhibitions have been presented by Nicodim in New York and Los Angeles; Unit in London; and Cris Worley Fine Arts in Dallas. In June 2025, Maruani Mercier Gallery announced its representation of the artist.
B. 1986, Valle del Cauca, Colombia. Lives and works in London and La Paila, Colombia.
Oscar Murillo’s canvases share Richter’s appetite for disorder. In 2023, his work Manifestation (2020–2022), a riot of violent color and linework, was shown at Gagosian alongside Richter’s abstractions. Much like those Richter works, Murillo’s paintings use a variety of materials, often stitching together bags or drop cloths. And even when Murillo paints directly onto canvas, it mirrors the energy of Richter’s scraped abstractions.
MILK CHOCOLATE (2014), for instance, features pieces of linen stitched onto a dirt-covered canvas marked haphazardly with various blue oil paints. Murillo pays great attention to the materials of his medium, echoing Richter’s methodology, where the act of creation was just as much a part of the artwork as the finished product.
“I don’t work on a painting with the goal of finishing it or having a complete and finished painting at the end of a work process,” Murillo said in an interview with BOMB. “The idea is to get through as much material as possible, and various materials go through various processes.”
After completing his MFA in 2012 from the Royal College of Art, Murillo presented his first solo exhibition with David Zwirner in 2014 and went on to win the 2019 Turner Prize. This year, his work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Gagosian in Greece, Kyoto, Japan’s Taka Ishii Gallery, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico.
B. 1956, Youngstown, Ohio. Lives and works in Shelter Island, New York.
Sandi Haber Fifield splices photography with painting. Her “Lineations” series combines reprinted and manipulated photographs with graphite and ink on translucent vellum, collapsing the usual separation between drawing and image. In this way, she mirrors Richter’s use of photographs to show how seeing is an active process built through change and reconsideration.
In the 2000s, Richter started to paint directly onto his photographs. In 2.5.2009 (2009), for instance, Richter covered the entire left side of the print with pink and red oil paint. In a similar spirit, Fifield’s cut-and-collage compositions playfully destabilize perception. A self-proclaimed “huge Richter fan,” Fifield writes in her book, The Certainty of Nothing (2010): “For me, photography is not just a method of recording the world, but a tool for examining and revealing its mysteries.” Like Richter, she treats the photograph as an image in progress, where the final result is uncertain and requires active engagement from the viewer.
Fifield graduated with an MFA in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1981. Her most recent solo shows were held by Yancey Richardson Gallery in 2024 and 2025.
B. 1965, Bremen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.
Berlin-based artist Johannes Kahrs paints film stills, news images, and snapshots in thin oil washes, dragging the paint on the surface to produce faces and bodies that appear half-erased. The blur lends his figures a psychological unease, as though the image is retreating while you watch. This disquiet connects directly to Richter’s 1960s photo paintings, where the soft focus of memory becomes the true subject.
The link to Richter is most evident in Kahrs’s Moongirl (2006), an image of a woman lifting her shirt, rendered in a haze of motion blur and blue light. Like Richter’s photo-paintings, Kahrs presents an image as if it is already disappearing, evoking the sensation of a fleeting memory. One of the best examples is Uncle Rudi (1965), a portrait of a soldier smiling, yet appearing to almost fade away.
The German artist has mounted solo exhibitions with Almine Rech in Paris, Luhring Augustine in New York, and MASSIMODECARLO, his representing gallery, in London and Paris.
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Maxwell Rabb
Maxwell Rabb (Max) is a writer. Before joining Artsy in October 2023, he obtained an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Georgia. Outside of Artsy, his bylines include the Washington Post, i-D, and the Chicago Reader. He lives in New York City, by way of Atlanta, New Orleans, and Chicago.
Header image: Gerhard Richter, Gudrun, 1987. Courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton.
