In the autumn of 2025, the diaphanous walls of the Louis Vuitton Foundation will host one of the greatest living painters. From October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026, Gerhard Richter's work will unfold its folds and fissures in a masterful retrospective, encompassing more than six decades of creation.
In the contemporary art scene, few figures inspire respect, wonder, and questioning like him. Born in Germany in 1932, Richter has constantly navigated between figuration and abstraction, between the intimate and the political, as if he were trying, without ever settling down, to circumscribe the shifting contours of an ever-elusive reality.
The Louis Vuitton Foundation, which had already presented some of his works at its opening in 2014, is now dedicating a tribute to him worthy of his career, bringing together nearly 270 works in a chronological display conceived as a visual narrative of the second half of the 20th century.e century and the beginning of the 21steA fragmented but coherent narrative, where each decade carries within it the memory of the previous one, and the prelude to future questions.
In the first rooms, the visitor discovers the period of the 1960s. Grey, misty, almost photographic canvases are presented to him, born from family snapshots or newspaper clippings. Uncle Rudi (1965), in Wehrmacht uniform, smiles at his troubled past. Aunt Marianne (1965), Tender and poignant, it evokes the memory of the silent wounds of post-war Germany. With a deliberately muted palette, Richter rewrites history from seemingly banal images, forcing us to contemplate, beyond the visible, the layers of silence and the unspoken.
But the painter doesn't stop at the image. From the very beginning, he tries to shake its contours. In his glass panels, in his color charts, in his optical experiments, Richter doesn't copy, he questions. He seeks in light a form of physical abstraction, a way to divert painting from its mimetic vocation. For him, the nude becomes architecture; the landscape, tension; matter, language.
As the years pass, color is liberated: it ceases to illustrate and becomes the subject itself. In the large abstract canvases of the 1980s, the painterly gesture achieves a form of autonomy. The eye no longer seeks a figure: it loses itself in the layers of paint scraped, erased, and superimposed, like so many layers of memory. Nothing is fixed. Each painting seems to be in a state of becoming, as if painting were refusing closure, claiming its right to ambiguity.
Gerhard Richter, Carrot [Mohre], 1984 (CR 558-2)
But Richter never forgets the world. He doesn't confine himself to pure abstraction. One room suspends time: the series October 18th 1977 (1988) chills the viewer. Blurred faces, lifeless bodies, empty cells. The artist revisits the mass suicide of members of the Red Army Faction in Stammheim prison. The pictorial treatment is neither accusatory nor explanatory. It is haunting. The blur acts here as a necessary distancing, a rejection of the spectacular, an attempt to evoke without exploiting. The painting then becomes the space for an impossible mourning, that of a shattered generation.
In the final sections of the exhibition, the brush falls silent, or at least, it transforms. Algorithms enter the gesture. Richter works with systems, data, and probabilities. With 4900 Colors (2007), he delegates the task of organizing color to a mathematical formula. The ultimate paradox: the more the artist effaces himself, the more his gaze remains. As if painting, freed from the ego, could still speak to us of humanity.
And then comes the light. The vibrant, almost sacred light of the stained-glass windows of Cologne Cathedral. Thousands of colored squares, arranged by an algorithm, compose a checkerboard that is at once mystical, secular, and transcendental. Richter does not represent the divine; he organizes its light. He transforms chance into faith. A wager on the irrational.
This retrospective promises to be a deep dive into the complex and fascinating world of Gerhard Richter. We hope to discover not only the richness and diversity of his work, but also to feel the power of his vision, as precise as it is enigmatic.
The exhibition promises to open an intimate dialogue with the paintings, where each visitor can confront their own questions about history, memory, and the role of the image today. More than a simple chronological journey, it is a sensory experience that awaits the public, an invitation to see differently, to explore what art can still reveal in a constantly changing world.
“Gerhard Richter”
Louis Vuitton Foundation
8, avenue du Mahatma-Gandhi, Paris 16e
From October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026
