A record player sits on the floor, shown from above. Slightly off-centre in the corner of a room, it lies surrounded by cables and a power strip. Through a transparent lid, the white label of a black vinyl disc catches the eye.

This painting depicts the record player of Andreas Baader, member of the German terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF), inside Baader’s cell at Stuttgart-Stammheim prison, and was painted after a police photograph.
Gerhard Richter's Record Player is one of the paintings within the cycle October 18, 1977 relating to Andreas Baader. Both the pictures Record Player and Cell [CR: 670], which depicts mainly Baader's bookshelves, are often considered to have portrait characteristics, since both depict the terrorist's personal things and form a counterpart to the depictions of the dead Baader in the paintings Man Shot Down 1 and 2 [CR: 669/1-2].
Whereas in the source photographs one could recognise what kind of music was listened to or which books were read, these details are obscured in Richter's pictures by the painterly blurring. These paintings only give the appearance of telling us something about Andreas Baader as an individual.

The fact that the detainee had a record player in his cell could provoke different kinds of associations. On one hand, the RAF prisoners were kept in isolation for certain periods of time, during which the listening to music was probably one of the regular activities. On the other hand, the record player can also refer to the fact that the detainees refashioned electrical devices, such as appliances for listening to music, in order to communicate between the different cells.

In this painting the record player is depicted in a non-playing state. The stillness, captured in the painting, and the fact that the record player will never be used by its owner again, stand for the death of the person who owned it.
The still life becomes even more of a memento mori if one knows that the gun used by Baader to kill himself was presumably hidden inside the record player's casing.

Notes prepared by editorial team