In October 2025, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris will unveil a major Gerhard Richter exhibition featuring 270 works. These include oil paintings, watercolors, overpainted photographs, and sculptures crafted from glass and steel, covering the artist’s practice from 1962 through 2024 and revealing its remarkable scope.
Born in Dresden in 1932, Gerhard Richter received a traditional academic training at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he focused on still life, portraiture, and landscape. In 1961, he fled East Germany for Düsseldorf and later settled in Cologne to pursue his artistic practice. His influential contemporary vision reinterprets these traditions, shown chronologically from early figurative works to later abstractions.
Richter’s style involves a mediated interaction with his subjects—he rarely paints directly from what he sees but uses intermediary means such as painting over photographs or drawings, employing brushes, palette knives, and squeegees to create unique effects.
The exhibition is organized into 10 galleries, each representing different periods and themes:
Gallery 1, Painting from Photographs: Photography as a Source of Imagery, showcases everyday images drawn from newspapers and family photos connected to Richter’s personal history. By the mid-1960s, Richter began challenging traditional illusionistic painting with works like Four Panes of Glass and Color Charts. In Landscapes and Seascapes, he revisits traditional genres filtered through photography.
Galleries 2 and 4—Investigating Representation and Exploring Abstraction—highlight his signature blurring technique called Vermalung and a shift from representation to abstraction, with brushstrokes becoming central subjects in enlarged watercolor studies.
Gallery 5, Sombre Reflections, features the October 18, 1977 series—Richter’s only direct reference to German history—alongside other somber abstract works.
Galleries 7 and 9, titled New Perspectives in Painting: Chance, display small figurative and abstract works from a prolific period.
Galleries 9 and 10, Final Paintings, mark Richter’s move away from traditional painting toward glass and digital imagery, concluding with his return to abstraction.
The extensive collection will be on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton from October 17, 2025 through March 2, 2026.
