Now on show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is one of the most ambitious retrospectives of Gerhard Richter’s career. Running through 2 March 2026, the exhibition spans more than six decades of Richter’s artistic practice, presenting around 270 works that trace his evolution across styles, media, and themes.

Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, remains an indelible figure in contemporary art. After fleeing East Germany in 1961 for Düsseldorf, he later settled in Cologne, where he continues to live and work. The Fondation’s full-site dedication to Richter underscores his status: as one of the defining painters of his generation, his body of work resists easy categorization, weaving between a rigorous conceptualism and a deeply personal poetic impulse.

The exhibition gathers oil paintings, glass-and-steel sculptures, pencil and ink drawings, watercolors, and overpainted photographs. From his early, blurred “photo-paintings” to his later abstractions, Richter’s work is presented chronologically, offering visitors a rare opportunity to witness the shifts and continuities in his method and vision.

Long trained in traditional genres — still-life, portraiture, landscape, history painting — Richter has always filtered his images through a secondary medium: an intermediary such as a photograph or a drawing, which he then transforms into a distinct, autonomous painting. Over time, he has explored a dazzling range of techniques: applying paint with brushes, palette knives, or his signature squeegee, experimenting with reflection in glass works, and confronting collective memory in monumental canvases.

A key strength of the show lies in its curatorial structure: by dividing Richter’s oeuvre into roughly decade-long sections, the exhibition conveys both rupture and continuity, making visible the artist’s restless search — for form, meaning, and balance.

One of the exhibition’s most powerful strains lies in how Richter grapples with memory: personal, familial, national. Critics note that he does not shy away from dark chapters — his work frequently circles around trauma, ambiguity, and history. Portraits such as Family at the Seaside and Tante Marianne reflect intimate loss, while series like “18 October 1977” and Birkenau confront Germany’s turbulent collective past.

What emerges is a painter whose cerebral precision coexists with emotional weight. His abstract works—especially those made with squeegee—pulse with energy, uncertainty, and often, a sense of transcendence. As one reviewer put it, the exhibition “reveals Richter not only as a cerebral conceptualist but as a uniquely personal and disquieting force in modern painting.”

The Fondation—orchestrated by curators Sir Nicholas Serota and Dieter Schwarz—delivers this mammoth retrospective across all of its galleries, encouraging visitors to engage deeply with Richter’s studio practice and philosophical underpinnings. The narrative arc goes all the way to his self-declared cessation of painting in 2017; while teams of drawings and later works remain, the show underscores how even in “retirement” Richter continues to reflect, draw, and generate meaning.

Adding to the visitor experience, the Fondation offers guided micro-tours, a dedicated app, and family workshops. During school holidays, children can experiment with color grids inspired by Richter’s own “1024 Farben” series, thus connecting with his playful use of chance and order.

In scale, depth, and ambition, this exhibition could well be considered definitive. It is perhaps the richest single-venue survey of Richter’s work to date—and certainly one of the most public-facing. As Paris reaffirms its position as a capital of contemporary art, this Richter retrospective reminds us why he remains central: his work bridges personal and collective memory, rigorous technique and open-ended exploration, historical weight and pure visual poetry.

For anyone interested in 20th- and 21st-century painting, this is more than an exhibition: it is a journey through one of the most profound artistic imaginations of our time.

Cover: Gerhard Richter, “S.D.”, 1985, oil on canvas (image detail). Photo by Mani Nejad.

GERHARD RICHTER
FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON
PARIS, FRANCE
through 2 March 2026
www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr

.

.