“I’m happy to be represented by David Zwirner," explains Gerhard Richter in a statement on the David Zwirner website announcing their representation of the renowned artist. "I have known David since his childhood as I had already in the 1960s worked closely with his father, Rudolf Zwirner. I feel this represents a beautiful continuity across generations."
In 1968, the Rudolf Zwirner gallery in Cologne was one of the first to exhibit works by Richter, who had come to West Germany from East Germany seven years earlier. David Zwirner was four years old at the time. He later decided to follow in his father's footsteps and returned to New York, where he had previously studied music, as an art dealer and opened his own gallery in 1993, which hosted an exhibition of prints and multiples by Gerhard Richter the following year.
For the past 37 years, the Cologne-based Gerhard Richter has been represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery. He had actually announced his retirement in 2020, but returned two years later with new works for an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland.
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“Richter has, without a doubt, created one of the most conceptually complex and aesthetically heterogeneous oeuvres in the history of art," said David Zwirner in a statement. "By avoiding adherence to any single ideology or dogma, Richter has been able to both celebrate and subvert the very act of painting. In the process, he has single-handedly opened up the medium to entirely new possibilities and investigations. Now I’m looking forward to our first exhibition together in the spring of 2023 in New York."
