Gerhard Richter turned 93 this 12 months, and has nonetheless been arduous at work. Although he formally gave up portray in 2017, with a ultimate sequence of elaborate abstracts, he has not too long ago been turning out small, beautiful, painterly works on paper. And now the complete vary of his very lengthy profession, from his breakthrough photographic work of the Sixties to final 12 months’s ink-cloud drawings, will get what can solely be referred to as a gargantuan showcase this month, when the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris mounts Gerhard Richter, a 275-work retrospective.
The present is curated by two perennial Richter watchers: Dieter Schwarz, the previous longtime director of Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Winterthur, and Nicholas Serota, the previous longtime director of Tate. The 2 had been urged by Richter himself, when the Fondation Louis Vuitton approached the artist about doing an exhibition.
The aim from the start, Schwarz says, was “to do a extremely complete present” whose solely constraint was the inspiration’s over 3,000 sq. m of Frank Gehry-designed gallery house. The curators had been met with open doorways from each private and non-private collections. “The truth that Richter remains to be alive meant that no person needed to say no,” Schwarz says.
Richter has had a profession marked by radical reinvention. His early photographic work—reminiscent of Uncle Rudi (1965), a blurred interpretation of a household snapshot, exhibiting a smiling relative in Nazi-era navy garb—now appear a world away from the brash Nineteen Eighties summary works made with the assistance of a squeegee. And these works, in flip, appear virtually unrelated to the crystalline strip work of the early 2010s.
Richter’s Uncle Rudi (1965), which depicts the artist’s relative in a Nazi-era uniform
© Gerhard Richter 2025
With a purpose to take care of the number of the work, and the sheer variety of items, the curators have opted for a “strictly chronological” strategy, Schwarz says. The present will open with the portray that Richter now regards as his very first, the grey-on-grey Desk (1962)—a blotted-out, bare-bones picture that hints on the artist’s even earlier work, impressed by the French painter Jean Fautrier. Unfold out over 34 rooms, Gerhard Richter will wind down with a show of very latest drawingsthe dimension of ordinary A4 paper, through which Richter depends on a solvent to dilute ink, resulting in unpredictable, fanciful shapes, rendered in extreme colors and named after the dates they had been made.
A deference to likelihood, it seems, is a unifying component in Richter’s profession, say each Schwarz and Serota. Whereas the signature blurriness of his early photograph work was deliberate, maybe it anticipates the dribbles and deviations of paint that might mark later many years of summary canvases.
The opposite nice by way of line in his profession is a eager consciousness of German historical past. Uncle Rudi is remembered as one in all West Germany’s first main works to handle Nazi Germany’s wartime culpability, and the Dresden-born Richter—who fled East Germany a matter of months earlier than the wall went up in 1961—would go on to make complicating allusions to notable Germans as various as Johann Sebastian Bach and the Baader-Meinhof Gang terrorist Gudrun Ensslin, commemorated within the 1987 summary portray, Gudrun.
Richter versus Kiefer
Within the artwork world fame sweepstakes, the taciturn Cologne-based Richter vies for prime billing along with his garrulous fellow German, the France-based Anselm Kiefer. The 2 discover the implications of Germany’s previous, however the similarity ends there. Serota units aside the “complexity” of Richter’s historic allusions and concerns from the “rhetorical” photographs of Kiefer, whose use of discovered objects like barbed wire give his immense works a literalness fairly distinct from the extra equivocal, even airtight high quality of Richter’s work.
Richter’s Self-portrait (1996), which maybe sums up Nicholas Serota’s view that Richter is “by no means actually glad”
© Gerhard Richter 2025
Kiefer’s face, voice and amiable manner are fixtures within the artwork world; Richter, who not often provides interviews and has all however stopped going to openings, is rather more distant. The Paris survey features a uncommon self-portrait from 1996, exhibiting Richter’s blurred head encased in mushy, summary color blocks. The expression, insofar as we are able to make it out, is unsettled. Serota, who first turned conscious of Richter within the early Seventies, says placing the present collectively has revealed to him a goading however dynamic side to the artist’s life and work, one this self-portrait might sound to sum up: “He’s by no means actually glad.”
• Gerhard Richter, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 17 October-2 March 2026
