The influence of his early work in photography and figurative painting have remained somewhere in his imagination even in his most abstract canvases. His photographs seemed to beg for his paint brush or some other way of adding dimensions to what had already been imagined and captured on camera. They also want to cross over into a painting, a marriage of media, on the artist’s journey to what llies beyond an image. Richter started to over-paint on his photographs and the style gradually led to over-painting on his paintings too. He was experimenting with colour, texture and, maybe, abstractions beyond the abstract, even looking beyond the minimalist, and finding colours in grey and the power of a pencil simple line. I was lucky in 2014, to have come across his work in a new exhibition at the Neue Nationgalerie in Berlin (another great modern building, designed by Ludwig Mies Vander Rohe). The exhibition was based around Richter’s new work, Birkenau (2014), four giant abstract paintings based on harrowingly vivid snapshot-style photos taken in secret by concentration camp prisoners and showing the horrifying last moments of some of the Birkenau victims on their way to the gas chambers. The chilling photographs were on display here in Paris, and the impact of Richter’s abstractions was made all the more profound. with the comparison. For me, having seen the four Birkenau paintings before, meant that the whole of this new exhibition was a journey towards those paintings again. I thought, going round this large exhibition, that I could see how Richter painstakingly forged his way through developing styles to get this level of emotional depth, emotion that was added as another layer of paint over many years of experiments.