Gerhard Richter is one of the most famous artists of the 21st-century, leading the contemporary art market with his abstract paintings. He is seen as one of the pioneers of the New European Painting movement. Richter studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and worked as an apprentice to a sign painter, photographer, and painter. His “Abstraktes Bild” set an auction record, in October 2012, for a painting by a living artist, with a price of $34 million. In 2002, a retrospective of his work was put together at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which then traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.