Gerhard Richter - Position On The Art Market

Position On The Art Market

Following an exhibition with Blinky Palermo at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in 1971, Richter’s formal arrangement with the dealer came to an end in 1972. Thereafter Friedrich was only entitled to sell the paintings that he had already obtained contractually from Richter. In the following years, Richter showed with Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, and Sperone Westwater, New York. Today Richter is represented by Marian Goodman, his primary dealer since 1985.

Today museums own roughly 38% of Richter's works, including half of his large abstract paintings. Already by 2004, Richter’s annual turnover was $120m (£65m). At the same time, his works often appear at auction. According to artnet, an online firm that tracks the art market, $76.9m worth of Richter’s work was sold at auction in 2010. Richter's high turnover volume reflects his prolificacy as well as his popularity. As of 2012, no fewer than 545 distinct Richter's works had sold at auctions for more than $100,000. 15 of them had sold for more than $10,000,000 between 2007 and 2012. Richter’s paintings have been flowing steadily out of Germany since the mid-1990s even as certain important German collectors — Frieder Burda, Josef Fröhlich, Georg Böckmann, and Ulrich Ströher — have held on to theirs.

Richter's candle paintings were the first to command high auction prices. Three months after his MoMA exhibition opened in 2001, Sotheby's sold his Three Candles (1982) for $5.3 million. In February 2008, the artist's eldest daughter, Betty, sold her Kerze (1983) for £7,972,500 ($15 million), triple the high estimate, at Sotheby's in London. His 1982 Kerze (Candle) sold for £10.5 million ($16.5 million) at Christie's London in October 2011.

In February 2008, Christie's London set a first record for Richter's “capitalist realism” pictures from the 1960s by selling the painting Zwei Liebespaare (1966) for £7,300,500 ($14.3 million) to Stephan Schmidheiny. In 2010, the Weserburg Modern Art Museum in Bremen, Germany, decided to sell Richter’s 1966 painting Matrosen (Sailors) in a November auction held by Sotheby’s, where John D. Arnold bought it for $13 million.

Another coveted group of works is the “Abstrakte Bilder” series, particularly those made after 1988, which are finished with a large squeegee rather than a brush or roller. At Pierre Bergé & Associés in July 2009, Richter’s 1979 oil painting Abstraktes Bild exceeded its estimate, selling for €95,000 ($136,000). Richter's Abstraktes Bild, of 1990 was made the top price of 7.2 million pounds, or about $11.6 million, at a Sotheby's sale in February 2011 to a bidder who was said by dealers to be an agent for the New York dealer Larry Gagosian. In November 2011, Sotheby’s was selling a group of colorful abstract canvases by Richter, including Abstraktes Bild 849-3 from the collection of Marc and Victoria Sursock, a dreamy 1997 canvas of pinks and blues that was estimated at $9 million to $12 million. It made a record price for the artist at auction when Lily Safra paid $20.8 million only to donate it to the Israel Museum afterwards. Only months later, a record $21.8 million was paid at Christie's for the 1993 painting Abstraktes Bild 798-3. At Art Basel in 2012, Pace Gallery reportedly sold the red, blue and yellow abstract AB Courbet (1986), priced at about $25 million. When asked about amounts like that Richter said "It's just as absurd as the banking crisis. It's impossible to understand and it's daft!"