The most comprehensive retrospective of 93-year-old German artist Gerhard Richter currently on display at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris offers visitors an electrifying journey through one of contemporary art's most influential careers. The exhibition, featuring around 270 works organized both chronologically and thematically across multiple rooms, reveals the contradictory yet irreducible nature of Richter's art spanning over six decades.
Richter's artistic journey began with childhood memories of drawing with his finger on empty, greasy dinner plates, tracing fanciful curves and spatial structures. This early fascination with mark-making would later evolve into his distinctive painting techniques, where he places different colored blobs on canvas and intermingles them with slithery brushstrokes, or uses large squeegees and spatulas to push, drag, and scrape paint across surfaces. His process often involved picking up previously applied, sometimes half-dried paint, excavating previous layers while applying new ones until he could no longer think of anything else to do to a painting.
After receiving academic training as a mural painter in Dresden, Richter and his wife Ema escaped to West Germany in 1961. He soon began creating black and white paintings derived from photographs found in newspapers, magazines, and family snapshots. These early works included deeply personal subjects: his Aunt Marianne, who was later killed in the Nazi euthanasia program in 1945, his Uncle Rudi in his Wehrmacht greatcoat, and his father, a recently released prisoner of war. Family portraits and newspaper images, airplanes and bombs, histories and holidays all found their place on gallery walls.
Throughout his career, Richter has maintained both fascination with and mistrust of photographs, often taking them himself and returning to them as sources for paintings. His subjects have ranged from the intensely personal to the historically significant, including the Holocaust, the deaths of four Baader-Meinhof Group members in prison, and the moment when the second plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He has also painted everyday objects like toilet rolls, kitchen chairs, wine bottles, apples, candles, and skulls with equal attention.
The Paris exhibition showcases Richter's ability to shuttle between banality and profound meaning, sometimes embracing kitsch, mawkishness, and sentimentality. Visitors encounter tender portraits of Isa Genzken's naked back and his daughter Ella reading a book, alongside landscapes featuring gothic walls struck by light, wintry branches in snow, and squatter houses. One notable work shows Ema, his first wife, descending stairs naked in a clear nod to Marcel Duchamp's 1912 "Nude Descending a Staircase."
The retrospective's innovative presentation includes flip-flopping clear glass panels angled throughout rooms, creating complex visual experiences where Richter's paintings are refracted, reflected, and interrupted by gallery lights bouncing off surfaces. Mirrors and strip paintings with horizontal stripes create the sensation of a train hurtling past, while thick white abstractions provide moments of quiet contemplation. The exhibition includes his black and white abstractions named for winter months, works inspired by John Cage, and 4,900 squares of lacquered color created during his work on the stained glass window for Cologne Cathedral.
One of the most compelling series featured involves Richter's 1973 reworking of a postcard reproduction of Titian's 1530s Annunciation from Venice's Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Across five paintings, the sacred image becomes successively more jumbled and amorphous, with divine light diffusing until the scene dissolves into barely discernible forms. This progression exemplifies Richter's exploration of the impossibility of representation, similar to his panoramic "Funeral" that concludes his 1988 cycle of 15 Baader-Meinhof paintings titled "October 18, 1977."
Perhaps the exhibition's most powerful statement comes in its final room, where Richter attempted to work with photographs taken at great risk by a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 2014. After sketching these terrible, surreptitious images of cremation onto his canvases, he found the impossibility of painting them led him to expunge the images entirely. The resulting works bury rather than erase these references, creating masses of dark and light with layered black, grey, and red that make any connection to their source impossible to trace.
The exhibition's calculated presentation in this final room juxtaposes photographs, abstract paintings, and grey mirrors, leaving visitors wanting to see deeper into the work's meaning. When turning from the paintings to the grey mirrors, viewers find themselves dimly reflected and implicated among the objects in the room. Since 2017, when Richter stopped painting entirely, he has devoted himself mostly to drawing, marking another transition in his constantly evolving artistic practice. The retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton runs through March 2, offering visitors a rare opportunity to experience the full scope of one of contemporary art's most important figures.
