- Title: German painter Gerhard Richter opens exhibition in Prague
- Date: 25th April 2017
- Summary: PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC (APRIL 25, 2017) (REUTERS) ***WARNING CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** KINSKI PALACE IN OLD TOWN SQUARE, VENUE OF EXHIBITION BY GERMAN ARTIST, GERHARD RICHTER RICHTER ENTERING JOURNALISTS RICHTER AT NEWS CONFERENCE PHOTOGRAPHERS (SOUNDBITE) (German) GERMAN ARTIST, GERHARD RICHTER, SAYING: (ON PAINTING CONTEMPORARY ART) "There is not so much painting. That's why I am still very interested in painting. The other is more performance." PHOTOGRAPHER (SOUNDBITE) (German) GERMAN ARTIST, GERHARD RICHTER, SAYING: (ON BEING DESCRIBED AS A CONCEPTUAL ARTIST) "I don't mind being called that. Even though I once corrected it and said just because I contemplate things in my paintings, it is not conceptual art, in the immediate sense. I am interested in painting and what painting can do." PHOTOGRAPHER (SOUNDBITE) (German) GERMAN ARTIST, GERHARD RICHTER, SAYING: (ON HIS INFLUENCE) "(Laughing) Those were the old masters, the classics. Leonardo and such, Duerer, and so on. Everything that is good." JOURNALISTS (SOUNDBITE) (German) GERMAN ARTIST, GERHARD RICHTER, SAYING: (ON HIS CURRENT EXHIBITION) "By the way it's not most paintings, of the 3 thousand over 2 thousand are abstract." JOURNALISTS END OF NEWS CONFERENCE RICHTER LEAVING RICHTER SIGNING AUTOGRAPHS STAIRCASE OF EXHIBITION WITH BIG LETTERING ON WALL, READING 'GERHARD RICHTER'
- Embargoed: 9th May 2017 14:31
- Keywords: Prague Gerhard Richter German painter art
- Location: PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
- City: PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
- Country: Czech Republic
- Topics: Art,Arts / Culture / Entertainment
- Reuters ID: LVA0016DWD9A1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text:German painter Gerhard Richter, who is one of most expensive living artists, spoke to media on Tuesday (April 25) a day before the opening of his latest exhibition in Prague.
The exhibition at Prague's National Gallery will put on display some 80 works by Richter, worth millions of euros in what is the first such exhibition in Central and Eastern Europe. Czech art lovers had to travel to London's Tate Gallery, to Vienna's Albertina or to Paris in order to see such retrospective exhibitions.
The exhibition shows paintings from the entire career of the 85-year-old artist, including his first work of photographic realism - blurred paintings based on real photographs - of the 1960s and the later abstract paintings he is known for.
Richter's "Abstract Painting" sold in 2015 for $46.3 million (42.5 million euro) at Sotheby's London and achieved an auction record for a work by a living European artist.
The Prague exhibition will also include 'Iceberg', a painting that was sold for the equivalent of 20.5 million euros in March 2017, becoming the most expensive landscape painting in the world.
Richter fled from East Germany to West Germany in 1961 has worked through his art with topics of Germany's and his own family's Nazi past, the Holocaust, World War Two, the RAF terrorist group as well as the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The exhibition in Prague runs until September 3. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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