The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is presenting a major retrospective dedicated to the protean and unclassifiable work of German painter Gerhard Richter. At 93 years old, the artist continues to challenge artistic conventions through his diverse body of work that spans photorealistic paintings, abstract compositions, and historically charged pieces that probe the depths of memory and perception.
Richter's troubling artistry lies in his ability to paint faces we think we recognize alongside abstract canvases that reflect back to us like spotted mirrors. Whether invoking history or intimacy, he seeks to defuse certainties by blurring them, always leaving viewers suspended in an in-between state. His career reads simultaneously like a novel of 20th-century Germany and a laboratory dedicated to aesthetic doubt.
Born in Dresden in 1932 when everything was changing, Richter's childhood was marked by trauma and upheaval. His mother was a bookseller, his father a teacher. At age 10, he was enrolled in the Pimpfe, an organization preparing children to join the Hitler Youth. Three years later, he witnessed Allied bombers over his native city, which was reduced to ashes. "I remember the ruins being cleared with shovels," he would later confess soberly. This shattered childhood never left him.
Like many Germans, Richter belonged to a family composed of both perpetrators and victims of Nazism. His Uncle Rudi died in the war wearing a Wehrmacht uniform. His Aunt Marianne, who suffered from schizophrenia, was "eliminated" as part of a eugenics program. Gerhard survived, grew up, and dreamed of becoming an artist. But how does one create after the unthinkable, when certainties have been shattered?
After studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s and working as a decorator and workshop assistant, Richter made a pivotal choice in 1961. Two months before the construction of the Berlin Wall, he fled East Germany for the West and was accepted at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. The shock was total. Trained to represent heroic workers and flourishing collective farms, he discovered the joy of living through the lens of advertising, confronting Warhol's Coca-Cola bottles and Pollock's dripping technique.
While others might have chosen sides, Richter refused such simplicity. "A man doesn't always behave the same way, doesn't always dress the same way, while remaining the same person. That's what I did," he states with disarming simplicity. His first exhibition in 1962 was purely commercial, and he burned his canvases after their presentation. Around this time, he began his "Atlas," a central piece of his work consisting of an enormous visual filing system gathering personal photographs, newspaper clippings, and found images that he glued onto boards and archived.
The "Atlas" functions as the dark room of his practice, with sources, ideas, motifs, and impressions serving as raw material. Richter describes it as an attempt to "gather everything": memories, objects, images "between art and waste." This experimental approach established painting as a field of reflection rather than mere representation.
"Table" (1962) marked Richter's artistic birth at age 30, which he designated as his "painting number one." Created from a photograph found in an Italian magazine, it represented a complete break from his academic training in socialist realism. Richter developed his signature blurring technique: painting from photographs, then partially erasing the still-fresh image. This gesture was both destructive and revelatory, as if clarity were a certainty to be mistrusted.
Recognition came gradually. In 1977, a symbolic event occurred when the brand-new Centre Georges Pompidou dedicated its first French exhibition to him on its very opening day, thanks to curator Daniel Abadie who had spotted his talent. The painter entered French public collections. Documenta X in Kassel in 1997 marked a turning point when Richter exhibited his entire "Atlas," followed by the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale the same year. International consecration was achieved, culminating in a two-floor retrospective at New York's MoMA in 2002.
Success matters little to him. "What always surprises me is that people say in front of one of my paintings 'it's a Richter,' when I go to such trouble to remain anonymous," he reflects. In his immense Cologne studio where he moves around by bicycle, Richter paints everything: portraits from photographs, shimmering abstractions, misty landscapes, still lifes. One day, it's explosions of color scraped with a board across 10 square meters. "There's a vague idea at the beginning, light or dark tonalities. We start slowly, seeing what's good, what's less so. And there, we're no longer so free, less and less, even. And we continue, until there's no more reason to change."
The next day, it might be his daughter Betty, now an adult, whose face is denied to us yet speaks volumes about both love and impossible capture. The image, painted from a photograph in the "Atlas," is worked to preserve the posture, lighting, and fabric of clothing while losing the gaze. An absence made full. "Betty" doesn't show a mystery; it seems to reveal the human condition. Some people turn their backs to us, sometimes by choice, sometimes through distance.
"I love uncertainty, infinity, and permanent insecurity," Richter admits. Then there are works on which history weighs like an anvil. The series titled "October 18, 1977," created in 1988, takes up images related to the tragedy of the Red Army Faction (better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang) and their members found dead in their Stuttgart-Stammheim prison cells. Richter transforms them into large paintings in gray tones, blurred, that neither accuse nor exonerate but pose questions about the spectacle of violence.
Painting these subjects ten years after the events means interrogating how history imprints itself, fixes itself, and fades from our consciousness. The result is almost clinically cold, as if painting sought to contain the event rather than dramatize it, to touch the past without ever naively embracing it. "The death of these terrorists as well as all the events that had preceded and followed it are the sign of an abomination from which I could not free myself, even though I tried to repress it," he explained.
The "Birkenau" cycle, completed in 2014, is monumental both in concept and pain. Inspired by clandestine images from Auschwitz-Birkenau, these works conceal under veils of paint what should never be forgotten. Standing before them, one doesn't first see bodies but shadow, warmth, distance, the erosion of memory. In these canvases, Richter applies, scrapes, covers, begins again. The artisanal gesture mingles with the duty of memory.
With Richter, technique is never neutral. He uses squeegees to stretch and erase layers but isn't engaged in gratuitous destruction. When painting abstractions, he leaves traces of gestures, revealed zones, summoned strata, resulting from a process mixing intention and chance. In his studio filmed by Corinna Belz in 2009, we see him observing his canvases skeptically. Suddenly, he covers everything with a thick layer of white. "For me, a painting is bad when I understand it," he explains, adding, "If I have something too precise in mind, I'm heading for failure. There's a certain unconsciousness; it comes by itself."
In his recent works, the "Mood" series presented at Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland in 2022, consisting of 31 small abstract paintings, we recognize the same thirst for hues, the same search for texture, but also the fragility of a body that can no longer move large formats as before. Each work is a visual poem: less imposing, closer to breath, to the slightest gesture.
Today at 93, Gerhard Richter lives in retirement in Cologne. In November 2023, one of his "Abstraktes Bild" sold for $37.8 million at Phillips. "It may also be just a fashion, a sort of chic. There can be a thousand reasons for success, good and bad," he comments with distance. While his work is haunted by what no one wants to forget, he rarely evokes intimate sufferings, out of infinite modesty. He creates to approach what we are without ever proposing consoling solutions. His portraits tear us away from fascination with detail; his abstractions remind us that the world can be remodeled, reworked, then left in suspense. While images propagate and devour themselves in a flash, he asks each person to take time to question themselves, as if doubt were one of the last luxuries.
