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“Motor boat” is displayed at the Kunst Museum in Basel, Switzerland. Richter made this painting shortly after he moved out of Desden in East Germany to Düsseldorf in West Germany. The Berlin Wall had been recently erected. Richter had suddenly escaped all the coercive dogma of socialist realism as he entered the new westernized world of post-modernist and experimental art. This painting is an essential piece from his oeuvre that’s definitive of that era. Richter based this painting on a staged advertisement photograph taken from a Kodak Instamatic Camera. In the 1960s and 1970s Richter often used black-and-white pictures from books and newspapers to make his paintings. Helga Matura (1966) and Cityscape Madrid (1968) are two examples for the same. He was popular for his blurring effect during this time period, which he has also applied to ‘Motor boat’. He believed that blurring helped him make everything “equally important and unimportant”.