Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and studied under Karl Otto Gotz at the Staattliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In the early 1960s Richter met and worked with artists such as Sigmar Polke, Konra Fisher-Lueg, and Georg Baselitz. During this period, Richter believed that painting should avoid reference and should focus on the visual image.By 1967, Richter began to paint Colour Charts, Grey Paintings and Forty-Eight Portraits. His diverse range of painting styles were displayed in the 2001 Retrospective at MoMA, New York, curated by Robert Storr. The exhibition highlighted Richter’s blurred figurative and abstract paintings in bold and subdued colour palettes. His work received critical acclaim for its non-traditional development and use of photographic sources. Richter acknowledges that he has “only highly imprecise and invariably false ideas of the motif” in mind when painting a picture.