Zeynep Gülçur on the most expansive Gerhard Richter retrospective to date at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
The great architect Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris has always struck me as a strange kind of museum: less an institution than a spectacular container engineered to impress before it ever invites you in. It has the gloss of a luxury corporate sheen that makes you wonder whether you’re entering a cultural space or a high-end retail experiment. The building performs boldness without ever risking it: all that glass, all that choreography of curves, yet it carries an atmosphere as sanitized as a showroom disguised as a museum.
For years, this tension has defined the place. And yet—the contradiction that remains—the level of retrospectives they present is undeniably rigorous. Basquiat and Schiele were unforgettable here, their contrasts and echoes forming an unexpectedly dynamic dialogue. Rothko was almost implausible in its intensity; you leave wondering how a space so cold can hold so much heat.
And now it is 93-year-old Gerhard Richter’s turn. Six decades of work unfold across those vast, pristine rooms, curated by Nicholas Serota, the former Tate director, and Dieter Schwarz, the Swiss curator considered Richter’s most rigorous interpreter. Their precision feels almost dictated by the building itself, as if the architecture demanded a curatorial discipline equal to its own. The German artist, who stopped painting in 2017 and now devotes himself to drawing, enters this glass cathedral with a quiet gravity, his presence amplifying the cold clarity of the space rather than softening it.
This is not Richter’s first retrospective, of course. He has been revisited, reframed, and reintroduced countless times—at MoMA, at Tate, and in 2020 at the Met, in a show that vanished almost as soon as it opened due to Covid. Each institution has told his story differently, as if the sheer breadth of his practice resists any single narrative.
But this one is the most expansive attempt yet: a chronological retrospective following, decade by decade, the evolution of his singular pictorial vision, unmatched in scale and ambition. Around 270 works trace a line from 1962 to 2024, an arc so wide it becomes less a survey than a kind of atmospheric pressure—you feel it before you fully grasp it.
Born to Nazi Germany and later trained at an art school in communist Dresden, Richter destroyed everything he made before 1962 and declared Tisch (Table) the beginning — number one in the catalogue raisonné. It pairs a mundane image—a photograph taken from a design magazine—with a deliberate gesture of erasure. The object itself is unremarkable; the act of wiping it away. What makes Tisch unique is that the erasure is not purely spontaneous: Richter reproduces, in paint, the very motion he had used to remove the image from the printed source with solvent.
Table is a manifesto: his rejection of expressionism, his refusal of socialist realism, and an early experiment in engaging with photography. From here, everything follows — the monochrome paintings, the soft blur, the cool, dispassionate observation that masks an undercurrent of grief.
His technique is famously meticulous: projecting photographs onto canvas, painting them with near-clinical precision, then interrupting that clarity with a blur that suggests the erosion of memory. The blur becomes his signature — a way to register time passing, perception slipping, meaning dissolving.
The vast show opens with Tante Marianne (1965), a work that already shows Richter’s interest in memory, history, and family. His early portraits of relatives—Frau Marlow (1964) and Familie (1964)—caught the attention of Cy Twombly in the 60s. From one master to another, Twombly, the high priest of lyrical scrawl bought the two paintings, quietly spotting the young German whose work would come to define an entirely different temperature of modernity.
And then there comes Ema (1966), Richter’s painting of his wife coming down the stairs naked—a direct, almost mischievous dialogue with Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Duchamp declared that his own painting marked “the end of conventional painting.” Richter’s photographic starting point gives rise to an image that is at once intimate, experimental, and declarative: painting, he seems to say, can begin again, free from the constraints of tradition.
When Richter adopts a new method, he is not demonstrating, he is investigating. Each shift feels less like reinvention than like research—painting as a lifelong laboratory. He never seems to look sideways at what other artists are doing. The quest is internal, almost monastic: his own education, his own intellectual satisfaction.
Which other painter could turn Titian into an abstract abyss? In a massive, sterile room of the Fondation, I stood before Richter’s series of five reinterpretations of Titian’s 1530s Annunciation, each painted in 1973 from a tiny postcard he had bought in Venice—the sort tourists lose in drawers. The first painting is Richterized with his signature blur, a homage; then, little by little, traces of the original emerge: the image is still legible, the light still soft. With each successive canvas, the figures begin to slip, perspective and colors dissolve into fields of movement. By the last painting, the scene teeters on the edge of recognition—abstracted, almost spectral—but the memory of Titian lingers, like a ghost beneath the surface.
This is where Richter moves toward abstraction—not to flee the image, but to question it. You watch painting test its own limits.
By 1974, Richter takes a deliberate turn: an entire exhibition made of grey paintings, a cool, almost ascetic refusal of both figuration and expression. It isn’t minimalism so much as a stripping-down. Grey becomes his way of saying nothing and everything at once. He once put it plainly: “Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations … It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make ‘nothing’ visible.”
In these works, Richter is trying to find the point where an image stops being an image. He pushes representation until it almost slips away. Around the same time, with the large colour plates, he begins allowing chance into the process.
Suddenly, painting becomes a mix of control and accident: layers are dragged, scraped, covered, revealed. Richter often starts by placing patches of colour on the canvas, then blending them with broad, fluid strokes until the surface becomes a field of movement. Pure colours mingle with muddier ones. The squeegee does most of the work—spreading paint across the canvas while picking up half-dry layers underneath. He adds, smears, and pulls the paint until the canvas reaches a point where he feels nothing more can be done. The painting finds its own equilibrium.
As he explored abstraction, he never stopped painting still lifes—his candles, skulls, and flowers—alongside portraits and a wide range of landscapes, from seascapes to the iceberg series. History, too, became a recurring subject. The Holocaust, in particular, threads through his work, tied to his family’s past. Like many Germans of his generation, his relatives were entangled with the Nazi regime: his mother’s brother, Uncle Rudi, died as a young officer, while Richter’s mentally disabled aunt—the one who welcomed us in the exhibition—was imprisoned in a Hitler euthanasia camp. Confronted with ideology and death from such an early age, Richter carried those shadows with him. They perhaps explain both his lifelong aversion to rigid systems of belief and the deep, almost instinctive pull that nature—vast, indifferent, and free of ideology—exerts on him.
Which prepares you for Birkenau (2014)—or leaves you entirely unprepared.
The four Birkenau paintings confront the viewer not with atrocity, but with the impossibility of showing it. Layers of paint are pulled and blurred, hiding the images beneath—photographs secretly taken by Sonderkommando prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Richter first saw them in the 1960s. He obscured them not to hide, but to demand a different kind of looking. Birkenau becomes a meditation on what painting can show—and what it must leave unsaid.
And somewhere between these monumental abstractions, the glacials, the intimate, the banal, and the historical portrayals, you begin to feel the full weight of Richter’s paradox: figuration and abstraction not as opposites, but as oscillations. Questions suspended in paint. Memory and forgetting, image and erasure, clarity and blur.
He moves seamlessly across mediums. Computer-generated minimalism, glass panels, and mirrors—their reflections, transparencies, and distortions—create new, shifting images with every step. I understand why he prefers the term “image maker” to “painter,” and after physically witnessing his craft, he is not wrong: his focus has always been on the image itself, not the act of painting.
Seen together, Richter’s six decades don’t resolve into a narrative. They accumulate, like weather. They surround you. They seep in. And in the immaculate cold of Gehry’s museum—you stand there, goosebumps rising, realizing something simple: when you encounter genius, you cannot not see it.
