GERHARD RICHTER DONATES ARTWORKS TO PROVIDE HOUSING FOR GERMANY’S HOMELESS

A donation of eighteen artworks by Gerhard Richter will help finance the purchase of one hundred housing units for the homeless across the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany, where Düsseldorf and Cologne are located. Three series of six abstract color offset prints—each belonging to the artist’s ongoing “Cage f.ff” series, begun in 2006—are on sale at fiftyfifty gallery in Düsseldorf for $493,080 and may also be bid on individually on the gallery’s website. The proceeds from the sale, predicted to reach $1.6 million, will go to the Housing First Fund, which launched its German branch in 2014 and strives to supply housing for the country’s increasing homeless population. 

Richter, one of Germany’s richest people, studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy before serving as a professor of painting there until 1993. He recently relocated to Cologne after being based in Düsseldorf for years, where an estimated two thousand homeless people live. Richter’s latest charitable move is one of many philanthropic projects he has participated in recently. He gifted a series titled “Birkenau” to the German Reichstag and contributed a photographic print of his painting Aunt Marianne, 1987, to a Saxony memorial to the victims of the Nazis. Last year, he gave a site-specific work to the city of Münster. The eighty-six-year-old artist first donated works to the Housing First Fund—which had previously offered works by Jeff Koons and Andreas Gursky—in 2015.