Gerhard Richter, 4900 Colours: Version II : Too beautiful for words

THE INTERPRETER IS FUMBLING and the sound system shaky, but the painter Gerhard Richter's press conference is facing another hurdle: the artist himself. It's early autumn at London's Serpentine Gallery. Confronted by the British art press, already struggling to make out his words, Richter – one of whose paintings recently sold for 7 million at Sotheby's – is stubbornly refusing to say anything – at least, according to the mangled translation from his German.

Tracey Emin would shine in this situation. As Edinburgh has learned through several appearances during her retrospective show, she excels in – almost exists for – parading her tangled personal history as part of her art. By contrast, Richter, 76, refuses to be a self-dramatising enfant terrible, saying that his art speaks for him. "Why should I have a big personality?" he asks at the conference, later expressing the opinion that the German art market is "verkommen" – has gone to the dogs.

He tells the somewhat startled journalists that the catalogue for his London show, 4900 Colours: Version II carries three essays on his work. "It makes me so shy to speak because they are so clear and explain everything," he says, sounding more brusque than shy. "You can read them, I think that's better than to explain it."

Richter once famously remarked: "Now that we do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the most important people in the world." He is asked if he still believes it, and says flatly: "No. It was 40 years ago I said this, I was a young man."

Gerhard Richter is not typically quite so taciturn, but for anyone who tires of artists who talk fluently about the deeper meanings of their own work, his attitude is refreshing. It has become an image in itself. Richter has avoided "the kind of taboo-breaking art that has become so utterly insipid, as well as the constant outpourings of a combination of chic and shock", writes Gotz Adriani, the curator of the major travelling exhibition of Richter's work that opens in the National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh next week. "More demure and likeably reserved, he most definitely is not one of the art exhibitionists for whom self-exposure is an existential need."

RICHTER WAS BORN IN DRESDEN in 1932, spending his youth in Nazi Germany and training as an artist in Communist East Germany – two of his murals in Dresden were painted over for being ideologically incorrect. He later fled to the West with his wife, a few months before the Berlin Wall went up.

He comes with many labels attached. The quote on the back of the catalogue for the exhibition here, spanning his work from 1963 to 2007, calls him "the Picasso of the 21st century". The more common label is "Europe's greatest living painter". He's praised for keeping the art of painting alive, partly by appropriating the medium – photography – that was supposed to kill it. But he has also shunned labels. While he has always painted, he has done so in radically different styles – his eerie photo-realist paintings, his brilliantly coloured scraped abstracts, his grey paintings, his colour charts. Early in his career he stabbed or slashed his own work, decorating the scars with dripping red.

According to Keith Hartley, deputy director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, who helped bring the exhibition to Edinburgh, his early years in Nazi and then communist Germany – where personal expression was frowned upon in favour of a form of art that was socially relevant and useful for the state – had a profound impact on his art. "He hates this idea of being coerced into doing anything that fits into a rigid pattern of what it ought to be. I think that explains why he's often moved when he feels that he's being pigeonholed."

Richter has created more than 2,750 works in his career. One of his most famous is Kerze, or Candle, the closely realistic image of a single candle glowing brightly. The 1983 Candle, used for the cover of the band Sonic Youth's album Daydream Nation, sold for 7.1 million at Sotheby's in February; a 1982 version is in the Edinburgh show.

In May this year, two of Richter's very different series of "Abstraktes Bilds", the colour abstracts, went for similar sums. That was three times what the artist would have sold for a few years before, but the art market – and Richter's growing reputation, along with his growing age – has swelled demand.

The London exhibition at the Serpentine, which runs until 16 November, derived from Richter's design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, in what is now his home city, where the stained glass was destroyed during the Second World War. The window consisted of 11,500 squares of glass in 72 colours; in the Serpentine, Richter is showing 49 paintings of 100 squares of colour. They were first put together in randomly selected squares of 25 colours chosen by computers; then four smaller squares were chosen by dice to make the paintings.

"The Edinburgh exhibition shows much more of the history," he explained in London. "Forty years of painting is very different." The work includes colour chart pictures, including 1024 Farben, 1024 Colours, from 1974. But in many works Richter leaves little to chance; he works exactly and painstakingly on the painted image.

The Edinburgh show includes landmark photorealist works, such as Motor Boat, with its weirdly dangerous, jubilant figures, or Family at the Sea, with Fascist overtones to the homely happiness. Richter created them from his own or "found" photographs, working them into exact but eerily indistinct paintings, at first with a traditional grid system, and later with projections.

Richter's youthful experiences in Nazi and then East Germany make their presence felt in his work. In the 1960s, as Andy Warhol made his own fame with celebrity images of Marilyn or Jackie, Richter kept his own Pop Art mostly personal. He painted his Uncle Rudi, shown posing in his German Army uniform, the picture of smiling military respectability, before he was killed in 1944; and his Aunt Marianne as an innocent girl. She was a schizophrenic who was killed by the Nazis in a euthanasia camp.

The exhibition includes Mustang Squadron, one of several paintings of deceptively peaceful warplanes; and Townscape PL, from 1970, one of the gray aerial paintings of a city. Both inevitably carry overtones of the area bombing of German cities including Dresden. "Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy," Richter said in London.

Certainly there is something inexplicably powerful about his work, particularly the brilliant colour canvases where he lays down layers of paint, sometimes with a squeejee, and then scrapes it away with a board.

From 1961 to 1964 Richter studied in Dusseldorf, where he held his first exhibition in 1963. In the 45 years since he has staged 100 solo exhibitions worldwide. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1972.

Since his early days, Kotz writes, Richter played the "utterly normal citizen" who practised painting as a professional. He embraced Goethe's maxim: "Create, artist, do not talk." In 2001 the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged a milestone retrospective of Richter's work. The collection showing in Edinburgh has come from Baden-Baden and Beijing and goes on to Vienna and Duisburg, Germany.

Richter has married three times, most recently in 1995. The number of shows has slowed his own workrate recently, he says. "Unfortunately I am involved in preparing shows and making catalogues and this is a difficult situation. But it will change again and I can go back to painting."

Keith Hartley says the many changes in Richter's style and approach – in his work it can be hard to believe you are looking at the same artist – are what provoke the comparisons with Picasso. "Richter is incredibly modest. One can't blame him. He doesn't stand on tiptoes and say look at me; he just gets on with his work. It's other people that say he is such an influential artist. He is a painter's painter. The really interesting thing about him is the fact that he is both avant garde and incredibly traditional. The main thing that comes out is that he wants to explore as broadly as possible the possibilities of painting, what painting can do."

Gerhard Richter is at the National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh, 8 November to 4 January.

Off the Richter scale

RICHTER'S fans include the Scottish artist Moyna Flannigan who was converted when she saw some early paintings in a small New York gallery ten years ago.

"There were two paintings of toilet rolls, an aerial painting of a city, a painting of a bomber," she says. "I can remember the show very clearly now. It had an incredible impact, because the paintings together were so different from one another. A painting of a toilet roll could, with some artists, be quite trivial but with Richter it becomes an important object. He's incredibly diverse, as well. He's done everything, in a way.

"His whole career has taken place at a time when painting has been under a hat as an art form really and with every new approach he has reassured the public about painting. The reason why he's reached this sort of level of incredible influence is because he is an artist's artist. There's hardly a painter today that has not been influenced by Richter."