I enjoy his abstract paintings, but am most drawn to his photo-paintings. He combines both painting and photography to create a blurred altered photo. "I blur to make everything equal, everything equally important and equally unimportant," Richter once said.
I feel like Tom McCarthy of The Guardian expressed it best:
"What is a blur? It's a corruption of an image, an assault upon its clarity, one that turns transparent lenses into opaque shower curtains, gauzy veils."
This alteration and incursion changes the photo entirely. What was once simply a portrait or landscape is now a metaphor for the effect time has on memory. Gorwing up in Germany during WWII and the rise of Adolf Hitler had a profound effect on Richter, and many of his works seem a bit violent.
His belief that an artist need not and should not adhere to one single style or medium has shown throughout his long career, it seems like he's done a little bit of everything. I highly recommend checking out his website and seeing all the different ways his visions has manifested over the decades. A personal favorite of mine is Atlas, a collection of sketches, newspaper clippings, photographs, etc. that Richter has been collecting since the 1960s.
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