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MANILA, Philippines - Who is this German visual artist who created the stained glass window at the Cologne Cathedral?
He has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus following the examples of Picasso and Jean Arp in undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.
He is regarded as the top-selling living artist. In 2011, his works achieved prices higher than any other living artist. His works sold for more than $200 million, topping auction result totals for Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti, and Mark Rothko combined.
The son of a schoolteacher, he was born in Dresden, Saxony on Fe. 9, 1932 and grew up in Reichenau, Lower Silesia, and in Waltersdorf in the Upper Lusatian countryside. He left school after 10th grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.
In these early days of his career he prepared a wall painting (“Communion with Picasso,” 1955) for the refectory of this Academy of Arts as part of his B.A. A further mural followed within the Hygiene-Museum (German Hygiene Museum) with the title “Lebensfreude” (“Joy of Life”) for his diploma.
Both paintings had been painted over for ideological reasons after Richter escaped from East to West Germany (two months before the building of the Berlin Wall); after German reunification, the wall painting “Joy of Life” (1956) was uncovered in two places in the stairway of the German Hygiene Museum.
From 1957 to 1961 he worked as a master trainee in the academy and took orders for the former state of the GDR.
When he escaped to West Germany, he began to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz together with Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg and Gotthard Graubner. With Polke and Lueg he introduced the term Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalistic Realism) as an anti-style of art,
In 1983, he resettled from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives and works. He married Marianne Eufinger in 1957; she gave birth to his first daughter. He married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982. He had a son and daughter with his third wife, Sabine Moritz after they were married in 1995.
Nearly all of his work demonstrates both illusionistic space that seems natural and the physical activity and material of painting — as mutual interferences. For him, reality is the combination of new attempts to understand — to represent, in his case, to paint — the world surrounding us.
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Last week’s question:
Who is this American chef who introduced Americans to authentic Mexican cuisine, and has changed the image of Mexican food in America through his cookbooks, television shows, and award winning restaurants Frontera Grill and Topolobampo?
Answer: Rick Bayless
Winner: Joella Abando, Parañaque City
