Gerhard Richter – Fondation Louis Vuitton, France

Continuing its monographic exhibitions devoted to major figures in 20th and 21st century art—such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Hockney, among others—the Foundation is dedicating all of its spaces to Gerhard Richter, considered one of the most important artists of his generation and enjoying international recognition.

Presented at the Foundation’s opening in 2014 with a collection of works from his collection, Gerhard Richter is the subject of a retrospective unprecedented in its scope and temporality, bringing together 270 works from 1962 to 2024—oil paintings, steel and glass sculptures, pencil and ink drawings, watercolors, and painted photographs. For the first time, an exhibition offers a comprehensive panorama spanning sixty years of creation in the practice of a studio painter.

Gerhard Richter has always been interested in both the subject and the language of painting itself, a veritable field of experimentation whose boundaries he has constantly pushed, thus escaping any single categorization. His training at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts led him to engage with the historical genres of still life, portraiture, landscape, and history painting, and his desire to offer a contemporary interpretation of these is at the heart of the exhibition. Whatever the subject, Richter never paints directly from nature, nor from the scene in front of him: everything is filtered through another medium, such as a photograph or a drawing, from which he creates an independent and autonomous image. Over the years, Richter has explored the genres and techniques of the pictorial medium, developing different ways of applying color to the canvas: with a brush, a palette knife, or a scraper.

This exhibition brings together many of Richter’s major works up to his decision in 2017 to stop painting, while continuing to draw. Each section of the exhibition, arranged chronologically, covers approximately a decade and shows the evolution of a singular pictorial vision, between ruptures and continuities, from his early paintings based on photographs to his latest abstractions.