Gerhard Richter

Known for: photorealist and abstract painting; the squeegee technique

Gerhard Richter fled East Germany for the West in 1961 and developed a practice deliberately split between photorealist gray-scale paintings — blurred reproductions of newspaper and family photographs — and pure abstract work made by dragging a squeegee across wet paint. He has refused to privilege either mode, treating their coexistence as a statement about the impossibility of a single pictorial truth. His Abstraktes Bild (809-4) sold for £30.4 million at Sotheby's in 2012.