Gerhard Richter is widely seen as one of the most important painters at work in the world today. Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932, he left dor the West in 1961, settling in Dusseldorf, where he held his first exhibition in 1963. He has exhibited internationally for the last five decades, including retrospectives in New York, Paris and Dusseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne. As the artist drqws near to his eightieth birthday in 2012, Tate Modern is staging a major restrospective exhibition, the first in Britain for twenty years.