( dpa ) - Gerhard Richter, Germany's top-selling contemporary artist, himself chose the works for a blockbuster retrospective show set to open Saturday in the south-western German city of Baden-Baden.
More than 60 paintings lent by rich private collectors or belonging to Richter himself will be on display at the Frieder Burda Museum till April 27.
Richter, who shot to fame with photo-realist paintings before moving to abstraction as well, chose pictures from the past four decades to show the development in his art.
Major retrospectives of his work were held in the United States in 1988 and 2001, according to his website, www.gerhard-richter.com. Only millionaires can afford his work today.
The painter triggered controversy last year with the unveiling of his abstract stained-glass window on Cologne Cathedral, one of the country's most venerable public buildings.
Entitled "Projection of Digital Image Noise," it was a gift from Richter, who trained in communist East Germany and moved west to make his home in Cologne.
The 11,500 coloured glass squares suggest an over-magnified digital image, and the image is in fact based on a picture of a 1974 Richter painting, "4,096 Colours."
It replaced a window that showed kings and bishops and was wrecked by bombing in the Second World War.
While tourists have streamed to see the window and the cathedral board praised the work, the current Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, sniffed that it was too abstract and would have better suited a mosque.