Gerhard Richter: 5 Engaging Ways to Hook Your Students

Gerhard Richter is one of those artists who can genuinely surprise a class. Show students a photorealist painting so sharp it looks like a photograph, then a squeegee-dragged abstract that looks like nothing at all, and tell them the same person made both. The disbelief in the room is your hook. Richter spent a career refusing to settle on a single style, and that restlessness is exactly what makes him engaging for KS4 and KS5 students who assume artists have one recognisable look. Here are five ways to open a Richter unit with real energy.

1. The "same artist?" reveal

Put two wildly different Richter works side by side, a blurred photo-painting and a scraped abstract, and ask students to argue whether one person could have made both. Let them commit to a position before you reveal the truth. The surprise reframes the whole topic around a compelling question: why would an artist deliberately work in contradictory styles? The range of works in Gerhard Richter – Between Photorealism and Abstraction gives you the striking pairs you need to make this reveal land, and it sets up the central tension students will explore all unit.

2. Paint like a photograph, then destroy it

Richter often painted from photographs, then dragged a dry brush across the wet surface to blur the image. Recreate the sensation:

• Students paint or draw a small photo as accurately as they can.
• Then they deliberately blur or scrape part of it.
• They write one sentence on what the blur adds or takes away.
• They debate whether the "ruined" version is more or less powerful.

The act of destroying their own careful work is provocative and memorable, and it builds straight toward the AQA, Edexcel and OCR assessment objective on developing ideas through experimentation with media.

3. Interrogate the blur

Richter's blur is not laziness; it is a statement about memory, photography and truth. Pose the provocation: "Why would an artist make a clear image deliberately unclear?" Students often arrive at ideas about how memory fades or how photographs lie, which is exactly the analytical territory you want. Connecting this to how other artists question the reliability of the photographic image, such as the vast, digitally altered scenes in Andreas Gursky – Digital Large-Format Photography, widens the debate into a genuinely contemporary question about whether any image can be trusted.

4. Stage a critics' debate

Split the class into rival critics and stage a debate on a deliberately divisive claim: "Richter's abstracts are just random, they take no skill." Give each side evidence to build their case, then let them argue it out. The controversy pulls in students who stay quiet in ordinary discussion, and defending or attacking the work forces them to articulate what they actually value in art. This kind of reasoned, evidence-based argument is precisely what stretches KS5 students toward the higher assessment bands.

5. Make it about identity and image

Richter's questions about images and truth sit inside a bigger contemporary conversation about how photographs construct reality. Bring in the staged self-portraits of Cindy Sherman – Staged Photography and Identity and ask students how both artists, in completely different ways, make us doubt what a picture shows us. For a generation raised on filtered and edited images, this hook feels urgent and personal, and it turns a lesson on a German painter into a conversation about their own feeds. Across all five hooks the move is the same: use surprise and contradiction to spark a real question, then let Richter's restless career become the way students answer it.

Related reading from the Teacher Hub

• Revision and Test-Prep Activities for Gerhard Richter
• A New Teacher's Guide to Teaching Caspar David Friedrich
• Building Academic Vocabulary in Andreas Gursky