Paris,
In its line of offering ambitious monographic exhibitions to key authors of the 20th and 21st centuries – among the most recent in its programming, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko and David Hockney – the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris now dedicates all its exhibition spaces to Gerhard Richter, the enormous German artist who, still active in his nineties, dared to contradict Adorno by stating that, even after Auschwitz, there is poetry.
Present in the collections of this institution since its inauguration in 2014, Richter is the subject this fall of this exceptional retrospective, which consists of almost three hundred pieces made from the sixties to last year, including oil paintings, glass and steel sculptures, pencil and ink drawings, watercolors and altered photographs. Until now, an exhibition of this magnitude had not been dedicated to it.
He may be, from Dresden, the most significant among the creators of his generation who decided to make pictorial language the center of their research, conceiving this discipline as a field of experimentation whose limits could be constantly explored, regardless of categories.
His first training at the Academy of Fine Arts in his city led him to develop early in the traditional genres of still life, portraiture, landscape and historical painting, and the rest of his career until today responds to the purpose of reinterpreting them from a contemporary perspective; It is in these investigations that this proposal is expanded.
Regardless of the themes he addresses, Richter never paints directly from life: each of his images is filtered through a medium intermediate —a photograph or a drawing—from which he constructs a new and autonomous work. Over the decades and up to 2017, he has explored a huge variety of techniques and developed various methods of applying paint to the canvas, whether with a brush, palette knife or scraper. In that seventeenth year he made the decision to stop painting, not drawing.
Presented in chronological order, each section of the exhibition spans approximately a decade in his career, determined by the break with certain earlier traits and the continuity of others, from his earliest photography-based compositions to his latest abstractions.
Even at the very beginning of his career, Richter’s choice of subjects was complex: on the one hand, he created seemingly mundane images taken from newspapers and magazines, such as the work that Richter considers his “number 1”, from 1962, a print of a table taken from an Italian design magazine and partially erased; On the other hand, he made family portraits that allude to his own past (Onkel Rudi, Tante Marianne), as well as the shadows of his country’s history (Bomber). Already in the mid-1960s, he challenged the illusionist conventions of his medium with his sculpture Four Panes of Glass and his first color charts. In his series of Urban landscapes explored a pseudo-expressionist impasto style, while in his Landscapes and Marines once again tested classic genres in a disruptive way.
The second room of the exhibition includes the forty-eight portraits that Richter prepared for the 1972 Venice Biennale: for him they marked the beginning of a new stage of reviewing the nature of painting through multiple means, including blurring; the progressive copying and dissolution of a Annunciation by Titian; the random distribution of tones in its large color charts; and the rejection of representation and expression in the calls gray paints.
Between the seventies and eighties, Richter would lay the foundations for his unique approach to abstraction: expanding watercolor studies, examining the pictorial surface and converting the brushstroke per se in the central theme of the painting (strich). At the same time, he created the first portraits of his daughter Betty and continued investigating “traditional” themes, such as landscape and still life, from approaches that were not traditional.
Motivated by a deeply skeptical vision of the artistic and social changes of that time, the one from Dresden would develop his series October 18, 1977 —exceptionally on loan from MoMA on this occasion—; This is his only set of works that explicitly alludes to the recent history of Germany (the death of members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group in prison). In the eighties he also produced some of his most striking and somber abstract works and, returning to the theme of his first family paintings, created the Sabine series with his son.
In recent years, before 2017, drawing grew in importance in its production. For Richter it is one of the few work methods that, essentially and if it is intimate and spontaneous, cannot be integrated into a controlled process; It is, in fact, the antithesis of control.
Those he carried out in the eighties were not shown to the public until the exhibition that Kunstmuseum Winterthur gave him in 1999: they offer linear forms developed from spontaneous sketches, worked until they become structured and blurred surfaces, in imaginary landscapes. Despite their suggestive power, he prepared them in small format, favoring direct annotation.
In 1996, Richter’s youngest daughter, Ella Maria, was born, and her life (and her work) received a perhaps unexpected boost. He moved to a new house (and another studio) in Hahnwald, on the outskirts of Cologne, but did not close his workshop in the center of this city so that he could work on different groups of works simultaneously. By then he was no longer painting individual abstract paintings, but rather cycles characterized by their highly articulated structure and tonal study. He also worked on intimate paintings executed from photographs, including his first self-portrait. Using everyday motifs, he created metaphors that reflected his melancholic vision of reality.
The commission to design the stained glass window in the south transept of Cologne Cathedral, which Richter received in 2002 and in which he used a random process to determine the distribution of colors, inspired him to undertake other projects. After painting the cycles Silikat and cagehe dedicated himself to working with glass – sometimes giving instructions for others to do so.
And after several years of hiatus, he resumed painting in a traditional sense in 2014 – as we know, not for long. The first topic he addressed was, again, the German past: for many years he had tried to create a work dealing with the Holocaust, but he had never found the right way to express the overwhelming emotions that this topic entails.
The starting point for his Birkenau paintings are the only surviving photographs of the concentration and extermination camp there, taken by the prisoners. Eventually, the cycle evolved into four abstract paintings that were exhibited for the first time in Germany, and later in England, and in the artist’s retrospective presented by the Metropolitan in 2020. In addition, photographic versions of this project are permanently installed in the Reichstag in Berlin and in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial.
2016 was an important year for future consideration: the Gerhard Richter Art Foundation was founded, with the aim of creating a permanent exhibition of a core set of his works in Berlin and Dresden. And between 2015 and 2017, he devised a series of overtly expressive abstract paintings that marked an end; After a pause, he declared his pictorial work finished.
In recent years, Richter has concentrated his activity on making drawings and works for public spaces. Instead of painting on the wall, he now works at his desk and dates each drawing, allowing his creative process to be examined over time. They are not carried out continuously, but in groups that span several days or weeks.
In these new plates, German explores the mechanics and possibilities of drawing as an artistic medium. Use lines, frottage and tones speakersand experiments with unusual techniques on it; The unconscious movement of the hand takes on unprecedented importance. Sometimes, he adds colored inks, which he drops playfully on the paper to recreate its random configurations, redrawing them with a ruler, compass or other instruments.
Richter continues working in Cologne, seeking other questions rather than answers.
Gerhard Richter
LOUIS VUITTON FOUNDATION
8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi
Paris
From October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026
