Gerhard Richter Retrospective 2025 - Fondation Louis Vuitton

Gerhard Richter
*Six Decades of Images at Fondation Louis Vuitton

written MONICA DE LUNA

Gerhard Richter enters Paris once again, the Fondation Louis Vuitton opening its entire body of galleries to his universe, six decades unfolded in a single itinerary, from the trembling blur of Uncle Rudi to the last abstractions where color collapses into silence.

Two hundred and seventy works march through the halls, oil and glass, graphite and ink, water and fire, every surface pressed by the restless hand of an image maker who once said, “I’m a picture maker.” The retrospective, running from October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026, refuses containment. It drifts through photography’s ghostly echoes, slips into the monumentality of color fields, twists into the cold sharpness of steel and mirrored panes. In the words of Suzanne Pagé, Artistic Director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton: “Gerhard Richter – a painter who defines himself as a maker of images based on subjects that he is constantly probing.”

Gerhard Richter, Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe), [Ema (Naked in a staircase)], 1966 (CR 134)
Oil on canvas, 200 x 130 cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Donation Ludwig, Collection 1976
© Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025)

Gerhard Richter, Lesende [Woman reading], 1994 (CR 804)
Oil on canvas, 72 x 102 cm
Collection SFMOMA, Purchase through the gifts of Mimi and Peter Haas and Helen and Charles Schwab, and the Accessions Committee Fund: Barbara and Gerson Bakar, Collectors Forum, Evelyn D. Haas, Elaine McKeon, Byron R. Meyer, Modern Art Council, Christine and Michael Murray, Nancy and Steven Oliver, Leanne B. Roberts, Madeleine H. Russell, Danielle and Brooks Walker, Jr., Phyllis C. Wattis, and Pat and Bill Wilson
© Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025)

From the early 1960s photo-paintings to the 1972 48 Portraits that hung in Venice, the show stages each decade as an island of vision. Blurred faces, dissolved saints, nurses with spectral eyes. The 1980s roar with vast abstractions, their squeegeed surfaces layered like geological strata. Candle flames rise against blackened grounds, his daughter’s face hovers in light, Venice is held still in paint. The 1990s open toward chance, toward the mathematical color blocks of 4900 Farben, toward the meditative hum of the Cage Paintings.

Then the rupture: 2014’s Birkenau. Four canvases, born from four clandestine photographs of extermination, overpainted into a veil of abstraction. Richter confessed, “It was like an old debt that I finally had to repay (…) I felt like I was fulfilling a mission.” The cycle faces itself across mirrored panels, forcing the viewer into an architecture of reflection and erasure.

Richter declared painting complete in 2017, withdrawing into drawing, letting graphite and wash occupy the space that once belonged to oil. Pages marked by hesitation, frottage, compass arcs. The retrospective ends here, in the modest scale of paper, an act of stripping down after the enormity of canvas. Nicholas Serota and Dieter Schwarz, curators of the exhibition, present Richter as an accumulation of acts. Serota recalls, “Everything that he does is very deliberate. To declare a painting as painting no. 1, as he did with Table, is a powerful act of will.” That will saturates every room. It lingers in the gray paintings, indifferent yet charged, and in the strips of digitally stretched color that seem to run beyond the eye’s grasp.

Gerhard Richter, Selbstportrait [Selfportrait], 1996 (CR 836-1)
Oil on linen, 51 x 46 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jo, Carole and Ronald S. Lauder and Committee on, Painting and Sculpture Funds, 1996
© Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025)

Gerhard Richter, Venedig (Treppe) [Venezia (stairs)], 1985 (CR 586-3)
Oil on canvas, 51,4 x 71,8 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Edlis, Neeson Collection
© Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025)

The Fondation Louis Vuitton, which first showed Richter in its inaugural 2014 exhibition, now turns over every wall to him. It is an atlas of fragments, a cartography of images remade, erased, blurred, overpainted. Richter once wrote, “In the first place, the basis is an intention – that of giving an image of the world.”

Here the image swells into multiplicity. A lifetime, distilled into 270 works, an exhibition that breathes intimacy and monument.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris will host a major retrospective of Gerhard Richter from October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026. Spanning more than sixty years of work, the exhibition brings together 270 pieces including paintings, drawings, sculptures, and overpainted photographs. Curated by Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota, the project offers an unparalleled view of Richter’s artistic journey from 1962 to 2024.

credit for header image:
Gerhard Richter, Apfelbäume [Appletree], 1987 (CR 650-1)
Oil on canvas, 67 x 92 cm, Private collection
© Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025)