“Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world,” says Gerhard Richter, who is better placed than most to make such a statement. The formidable, record-breaking German artist—who celebrates his eighty-seventh birthday today—has changed the language of abstraction and figuration in the course of his career and sold for unprecedented figures at auction. His painting I.G. (790-3) is on show at the Whitechapel Gallery as part an exhibition drawn from the “la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art, selected by the preeminent Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas.
