The Appraisal
Gerhard Richter Announced His Retirement From Painting in 2017. Since Then, His Auction Sales Have More Than Doubled
We examined the artist's market on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
We examined the artist's market on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
Naomi Rea ShareShare This Article
Last week, Gerhard Richter—one of the most important artists of the 20th and 21st centuries—celebrated his 90th birthday. In his native Germany and abroad, a host of galleries and institutions lauded his six-decade career with special exhibitions demonstrating the breadth of his oeuvre. Richter himself curated a show of landscapes and family portraits at the Albertinum Museum in his hometown of Dresden; Sies and Höke gallery mounted a show of drawings, his new favorite medium; and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin took a deep dive into his artist books.
We thought long and hard about what to get Richter for his birthday over at Artnet News Pro, and decided to gift wrap our findings from a deep dive into his market via the Artnet Price Database. HBD Gerhard!
Auction record: $46.4 million achieved at Sotheby’s London in February 2015
Richter’s Performance in 2021
Lots sold: 270
Bought in: 47
Sell-through rate: 85 percent
Average sale price: $915,947
Mean estimate: $737,235
Total sales: $ 247.3 million
Top painting price: $33 million
Lowest painting price: $32,033
Lowest overall price: $924, for a color photograph from 2013
Gerhard Richter is one of the most important artists of our time, and his market reflects that. For now, his abstract paintings remain the biggest prizes, but there is a robust market for smaller abstractions in the $10 million-and-under range as well as for the monumental canvases.
Just don’t forget there is more to Richter than the squeegee. He was for a long time most celebrated for figurative paintings and landscapes—his second highest price was achieved for one of his 1960s photo paintings—and his acclaimed “Birkenau” series was a focal point of the Met’s 60-year Richter survey in 2020.
The artist officially retired from painting in 2017 and has since turned his attention to drawing. This limit on supply could go some way toward explaining the revived market activity in 2021. As a slew of exhibitions to mark his 90th birthday explore the breadth of his oeuvre, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the market continue to climb.