In a career spanning fifty years to the present day, Gerhard Richter has cemented his position as one of the most important figures in contemporary art, described by The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones as “sublime, profound, and authoritative in a way that invites high-flown comparisons and invocations of art history.” He is an artist who refuses to be tied to any single movement, highly esteemed for both his photo-realistic and his abstract work, and, indeed, it is perhaps his firm belief in the symbiotic relationship between the two styles and the interplay of techniques and ideas from each that makes Richter’s work so unique. He is widely considered to be the greatest living painter, yet even in his medium he cannot be confined, working with both glass and mirrors to achieve some of his most famous works and installations. Wrestling with both the politically charged and the seemingly mundane, Richter is an artist who is both accessible and provocative to such an extent that Nicholas Serota (director of London’s Tate Modern) has deemed him “the painter of modern life”.