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Detail from: Gerhard Richter, Gudrun, 1987 (CR 633), detail. Oil on four canvases, 260 x 200 cm each. Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, loan from Gerhard Richter Art Foundation. © Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025) |
Fondation Louis Vuitton
8 avenue du Mahatma Gandhi ; 75116 Paris ; Jardin d'acclimatisation de Paris ; Bois de Boulogne.
Exposition du 17.10.2025 au 2.3.2026.
In partnership with France Culture.
Commissariat: Dieter Schwarz et Nicholas Serota.
Visited on 18 Feb 2026
AA: Visiting the magnificent Gerhard Richter retrospective is entering in chronological order a lifetime of art in many periods, approaches and techniques. There cannot be many active artists born in the Weimar Republic, but Richter is one of them.
He grew up in Nazi Germany, got his academic education at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in the German Democratic Republic, and found his voice in the Federal Republic of Germany where he signed the Opus 1 of his Catalogue Raisonnée in 1962.
A key continuity through all the diversity is a refusal of the live model, no matter whether a person, a landscape or a still life. There is no immediate experience, direct observation or unmediated perception. There is always a photograph, a magazine, a book page, an illustration or a pre-existing artwork. Richter's art is often a photorealistic, illusionistic, mimetic image of an image.
Richter's art is a grand remise en cause, a calling into question of our perception. His art consists of perceptions of perceptions. It is knowledge about knowledge, reflection about reflection. All art has a dimension of philosophy, and Richter's more than most.
Two years ago the 150th anniversary of impressionism was celebrated, and it was an occasion to think about the epochal self-reflective turn it brought in art. Impressionists painted from live models, and they went further than before, because they had a new awareness of the ephemeral and temporary, the incessant changes of lights and shadows, clouds, mists, smokes and other air pollutions, temperatures, radiations and reflections, even the moods that guide our perceptions. In the instant they found eternity.
Impressionists were philosophers of the immediate experience, by necessity, whether consciously or intuitively. Gerhard Richter's world is different. He lives in the society of spectacle. He swims in a deluge of images, keeping his distance, fighting back.
Besides meta-imagery, a further major current in Richter's work is abstraction. Among his abstractions are series of paintings which begin with a highly transformed but still recognizable reflection of another painting such as Tizian's Annunciation. Subsequent paintings move further away from the original and end in a cycle of pure abstractions.
Richter's work is also essential from the perspective of the end of art, the rejection of the classical tenets of the beautiful and the sublime. There is no agreement yet about a terminology for the non-beautiful and the non-sublime. Much modern art looks ugly and/or banal from the traditional perspective, but what it actually is is something beyond the conventional. It may be challenging, unsettling, disturbing, transcendent, illuminating. Whatever it is, it doesn't let us in peace.
From pictures in magazines the exhibition proceeds to paternal family photo albums and romantic landscapes (Gallery 1) to a portrait gallery of 48 public figures, classic subjects from lakes and meadows to starry skies and seascapes and from pointillist wall-sized mosaics of pure colours to abstract pencil drawings (Gallery 2). (There is no Gallery 3 in the exhibition).
In Gallery 4 we can examine outsized elongated paintings whose subject is an endless brushstroke. We are also allowed to study a set of 120 photographs of an image. From l'art pour l'art emphases Richter moves to the disturbing topic of terrorism in the 6. October 1977 cycle (Gallery 5). Richter also works on paper, pursuing both the colourism of watercolours and the black and white glory of pencil drawings. He creates Eckspiegel, mutually reflective monochromatic corner mirrors. He paints giant abstractions in which he uses besides the paintbrush also a palette knife and a squeegee. He devotes intimate series of paintings to his own family with three children (Gallery 6).
Mirrors reflect masks. In Gallery 4 there is a wall-length horizontal mirror. "Don't blame the mirror if your face is crooked" (Nikolai Gogol). In Gallery 7, there is a 11-layered mirror, whose image resembles the blur characteristic of Richter's oil paintings. Impressionists integrated reflections in their visions. Richter finds in reflections the very subjects of his glass sculptures and installations. (There is no Gallery 8).
One of the grandest exhibits is the abstract Cage cycle in Gallery 9, devoted to the composer John Cage. Gradually taking absence from painting, Richter produced a series called Strips by digital processing.
His abstract ventures range from wild, jarring colour dysfunctions to works which take absence even from the nonfigurative. The Black Square could be seen as a defiant statement at the Age of Empire, but Richter creates gray rectangles. They are not even black. A similar impact is in series of paintings in dirty colours. In Gallery 11 we discover the latest drawings, conducted in line, frottage or tone. The last mirrors are startlingly gray.
In the last corner of Gallery 10 we face what for me is the terminus: four photographs, the only ones that remain of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp when it was still active, taken by the prisoners. Reflecting on them, Richter created four abstract paintings. The Richter family also had a Holocaust victim: Gerhard's aunt Marianne was murdered in the euthanasia project by the Nazis because of her mental illness.
The exhibition was packed. Waiting in the long line to the coat rack I asked how fellow visitors would rank the show on the Richter scale, used to measure earthquakes. "Ten" was the answer. I remembered a favourite quote from This Is Spinal Tap, directed by Rob Reiner (1947–2025): "These go to eleven".
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OFFICIAL INTRODUCTION: "From October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026, the Fondation presents a major retrospective of works by Gerhard Richter—one of the most influential contemporary artists—born in Dresden in 1932. He fled East Germany for Düsseldorf in 1961 before settling in Cologne, where he currently lives and works."
"Continuing its tradition of landmark monographic exhibitions devoted to leading figures of 20th and 21st-century art — including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Hockney — the Fondation dedicates all its galleries to Gerhard Richter, widely regarded as one of the most important and internationally celebrated artists of his generation."
"Gerhard Richter was featured in the inaugural presentation of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2014, with a group of works from the Collection. Now, the Fondation is honoring the artist with an exceptional retrospective — unmatched both in scale and in chronological scope — featuring 275 works stretching from 1962 to 2024. The exhibition includes oil paintings, glass and steel sculptures, pencil and ink drawings, watercolors, and overpainted photographs. For the first time, an exhibition will offer a comprehensive view of over six decades of Gerhard Richter’s creation - an artist whose greatest joy has always been working in his studio."
"Gerhard Richter has always been drawn to both subject matter and the very language of painting — a field of experimentation whose boundaries he has continually pushed, avoiding any singular categorization. His training at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts led him to engage with traditional genres such as still life, portraiture, landscape, and history painting. His desire to reinterpret these genres through a contemporary lens lies at the heart of this exhibition. Regardless of subject, Richter never paints directly from nature or from the scene before him: every image is filtered through an intermediary medium — through a photograph or a drawing — from which he constructs a new, autonomous work. Over time, he has explored an extraordinary range of genres and techniques within painting, developing various methods of applying paint to canvas — whether with a brush, a palette knife, or a squeegee."
"The exhibition brings together many of Richter’s most significant works up to his decision in 2017 to stop painting, while continuing to draw. Presented in chronological order, each section spans approximately a decade and traces the evolution of a singular pictorial vision — one shaped by both rupture and continuity — from his early photo-based paintings to his final abstractions."
Gallery 1: 1962–1970 — Painting from Photographs: Photography as a Source of Imagery
"From the outset, Richter’s choice of subjects was complex: on the one hand, seemingly mundane images taken from newspapers and magazines, such as the work that Richter regards as his ‘number 1’, in 1962, an image of a table taken from an Italian design magazine and partially obliterated, (Tisch); on the other, family portraits referring to his own past (Onkel Rudi, Tante Marianne), as well as to the shadows of German history (Bombers). Already in the mid-1960s, Richter was challenging the illusionist conventions of painting with his sculpture Four Panes of Glass and his first Color Charts. With the Cityscapes, he explored a pseudo-expressionist impasto style; with the Landscapes and Seascapes, he tested classic genres against the grain."
Gallery 2: 1971–1975 — Investigating representation.
"The 48 Portraits, painted for the 1972 Venice Biennale and a true tour de force, mark the beginning of a new chapter in which Richter interrogates the nature of painting in multiple ways: through the use of his signature blur technique (Vermalung); the progressive copying and dissolution of a Titian Annunciation; the random distribution of color in the large Color Charts; and the rejection of representation and expression in the Grey Paintings."
Gallery 4: 1976–1986 — Exploring abstraction.
"During this decade, Richter laid the foundations of his distinctive approach to abstraction: enlarging watercolor studies, examining the painted surface, and making the brushstroke itself the subject of a painting (Strich). At the same time, he painted the first portraits of his daughter Betty and continued exploring traditional subjects such as landscape and still life."
Gallery 5: 1987–1995 — “Sombre reflections.”
"Motivated by a profoundly skeptical view of artistic and social change, Richter painted the October 18, 1977 series — exceptionally on loan from MoMA — his only body of work that explicitly refers to recent German history. During this period, he also produced some of his most striking and somber abstract works. Returning to the theme of his early family paintings, Richter created the Sabine mit Kind series."
Galleries 7 and 9: 1996–2009 — New perspectives in painting: chance.
"In the late 1990s, Richter entered a highly productive period, spanning small figurative and abstract works, the austere Silikat series, experiments with chance that culminated in 4900 Colors, and the meditative Cage Paintings, a tribute to composer John Cage."
Galleries 9 and 10: 2009-2017 — Final paintings.
"Richter surprised audiences by abandoning painting for several years to experiment with glass works and digitally generated Strip images. He returned to painting with Birkenau, a group of works inspired by four photographs taken inside a Nazi extermination camp. The final room of paintings presents his last masterful abstract canvases completed in 2017, after which Richter’s attention has focused on the drawings shown in Gallery 11."
"Sculpture appears at key points throughout the exhibition, and three rooms dedicated to watercolors, drawings and overpainted photographs provide an interlude and change of pace in the 1970s and 1990s, while illustrating the artist’s ongoing concerns since he stopped painting in 2017."
