We live in a world saturated with images. They can be deeply personal or commoditized, produced and consumed ad infinitum. But for the internationally renowned artist Gerhard Richter, they attest to a monumental career that not only moves through a multitude of genres, but also transmits meaning from each and every surface.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris has unveiled the most definitive Richter retrospective to date, on the same unprecedented scale as prior exhibitions dedicated to David Hockney and Mark Rothko. (It’s on view through until March 2, 2026.) More than 270 works are presented in chronological order, spanning six decades: the photo paintings—and the development of his signature blur technique—beginning in 1962; his systematic Color Charts that later evolve into dizzying digital strips; his recomposed landscapes and the all-gray canvases that represent his attempt to paint nothing; the staggering, large-scale abstractions and smaller, equally staggering still lifes; the various glass-paned pieces experimenting with reflection that eventually form part of Birkenau (2014), in which he tackles the weightiest of historical subjects—especially as a German who’d experienced WWII. Interspersed throughout the galleries are his drawings (up until 2024), appearing at once freeform and assiduously technical.
“It presents the body of work he wanted to define for eternity,” says Suzanne Pagé, artistic director of the FLV. She met Richter when assembling a group show in 1981 and oversaw his first Paris retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in 1993. “Richter’s art bears the responsibility of the world, the great dramas of history and of today… His are the ones that stop you, the ones that make you see.”
Indeed. Pausing in front of his abstractions, for instance, you might notice the smearing of vivid colors applied in layers so that they catch and converge; the directionality of the scraper—essentially a humongous squeegee—that Richter used to pull the paint across the canvas; the fact that, for all the non-representation, you will find your own ideas and emotions embedded within.
A documentary on the artist, Gerhard Richter Painting, from 2011 is illuminating—not only to watch him produce the giant abstract works, but to gain insight into what each work entails mentally. “It becomes more difficult with each step,” he says. “And I feel less and less free until I conclude there is nothing left to do—when, according to my standard, nothing more is wrong. Then I stop, and that’s it.”
“Richter’s art is about control, but also about chance,” says Pagé. “That’s what’s so extraordinary: mastery and randomness, like Bach’s music—perfectly structured, yet allowing for the unexpected.”
It’s no wonder that Bernaud Arnault writes in the foreword of the exhibition catalogue that Richter is “one of my favorite artists”; his collection confirms as much. When the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened in 2014, Richter was already prominently represented, with 14 works. Now the tally has grown to 35 and includes Hirsch [Deer], an early grisaille painting from a photograph of the animal in a loosely depicted forest, and the recognizably Richter-ian 4900 Farben [4900 Colors], made up of 196 separate lacquered panels of 25 squares each.
Essentially, Richter spent a lifetime interested in “the relationship we have with reality,” as he has put it, without ever starting with reality, and without ever embellishing the process or context. All of the characteristically blurred portraits—including his own in 1996—he painted from photographs. He called his swirl of chromatic lacquer on Plexiglass, which has a marbling effect, Flow, and a series of abstract paintings Abstract Paintings. Among the most impressive for its size alone is Stroke (on Red), which runs the length of a large wall and contains what looks like one extended and enlarged yellow brushstroke on a speckled red backdrop, but is really the work of highly precise small ones.
“He stretched—literally stretched—the language of painting,” says Nicholas Serota, who was director of the Tate when the museum mounted its own Richter retrospective in 2012, which Serota curated with Dieter Schwarz.
Richter, he adds, is “not just rendering an image, but carrying forward memory and the passage of time between the moment a photo was taken and when it was painted.”
This was certainly the case with the portrait of his daughter, Betty, painted in 1988 from a photo taken in 1977, and Lesende [Reader], portraying his wife at the time, Sabine Moritz-Richter. Richter doesn’t intervene on either scene; instead it’s the hazy, glowing light on their hair or in the textures of their clothes that establish a remarkable connection.
Such moments challenge Richter’s reputation for being cool and analytical. “There’s undoubtedly a very strong cerebral element in the painting as he moves himself forward,” says Serota. “But at the end of the day, it’s a kind of curiosity about emotion, and actually even a curiosity about the history of the times through which he has lived.”
His painting of the 9/11 attacks, simply titled September, provoked an instant response in me the first time I saw it at the Museum of Modern Art, and then again here. The work is deliberately contained, no larger than a small television. There is blue sky, a gray haze of smoke, the upper heights of the two monolithic buildings—and then there are the streaks that are open to interpretation, but act upon the image with great intensity.
He harnesses a similar power with the Birkenau cycle from 2014, which Schwarz has referred to as an “elegiac abstraction.” The photos of the concentration camps that were his source material are not even remotely discernible, yet they remain encoded into these four large paintings where black and white are broken up with swaths of red and green.
In 2017, Richter decided to stop painting. Never mind the physical effort the work requires: he simply determined that his practice was complete. The exhibition shows off such a great expanse of his career—the toilet roll that toes the line of Pop Art; the 48 portraits of scientists, writers, composers and philosophers from an encyclopedia in 1971 for the Venice Biennale; his luscious homages to Titian, reunited for the first time; the Silicate series, in which he painted the most abundant element on the Earth’s surface as a blurred repeating graphic motif—that visitors will come away understanding his rationale.
Today, at 93, Richter lives a quiet life on the edge of Cologne. Although he is “a little frail,” per Serota, “he is mentally very sharp and he continues to draw most days.”
Pagé, meanwhile, underscores the value of spending time with his works. “His paintings are emotional and beautiful, but also rigorously thought through. Look carefully, and the image will stay with you; it will never leave.” Blumen, a painting of blurred, bright pink flowers wilting one by one, comes to mind.