Gerhard Richter: A Vision in Blur and Clarity

A major retrospective of works by Gerhard Richter is currently on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Bringing together 275 works produced between 1962 and 2024, the exhibition traces more than six decades of Richter’s practice across painting, abstraction, glass works, and digital prints.

Richter previously appeared in the Fondation’s inaugural presentation in 2014 through works drawn from the collection. The current exhibition marks the first time the institution has dedicated all of its gallery spaces to the artist. Curated by Nicholas Serota and Dieter Schwarz of the Kunst Museum Winterthur, the presentation occupies 34 galleries. It continues the Fondation’s series of large-scale monographic exhibitions devoted to major figures of 20th- and 21st-century art, following previous retrospectives of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Hockney.

Between systems

Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, a city that would later be decimated by Allied bombing during World War II and absorbed into Soviet-controlled East Germany. He defected to West Germany in 1961, just months before the Berlin Wall was erected. There, in Düsseldorf, he found kinship with Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, with whom he developed what they called Capitalist Realism, an anti-style that borrowed the visual language of advertising and mass culture. The term deliberately echoed Socialist Realism, the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union, while also critiquing the consumer-oriented aesthetic ideology of Western capitalism.

The earliest rooms of the retrospective focus on Richter’s early development. His photopaintings, begun in 1962, mark a rupture with both ideological painting and Abstract Expressionism. Drawing on sources ranging from newspapers and magazines to family photographs, these works juxtapose everyday imagery—such as Tisch (1962), taken from an Italian design magazine—with personal and historical subjects, including Onkel Rudi, Tante Marianne, and Bombers. Executed in grayscale and marked by a blurred surface, the paintings explore the relationship between photographic sources and paint.

Painting Against Certainty

Installation view of “Gerhard Richter”

Richter’s work is often discussed in terms of figuration and abstraction, but the retrospective presents a broader view of his practice. Across different periods and media, the exhibition emphasizes his ongoing interest in how images are seen, reproduced, and understood, and how their meaning shifts over time.

In the 1970s, Richter produced several key series that reflect this focus. 48 Portraits, created for the 1972 Venice Biennale, consists of grayscale images of well-known cultural figures—including Giacomo Puccini, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, and Oscar Wilde—based on photographic sources and painted with a softened, uniform surface. The series addresses questions of representation, selection, and the status of historical figures in visual culture.

During the same decade, Richter explored non-illusionistic painting through the Grey Paintings and Color Charts, as well as works that obscure or fragment earlier images, such as his reinterpretation of Titian’s Annunciation. Sculpture also became part of his practice at this time, notably with Four Panes of Glass (1967), extending his interest in surface, transparency, and spatial perception.

From the late 1970s through the 1990s, Richter refined the abstract language that would become emblematic of his practice: vast canvases worked with a squeegee, where pigment is dragged, scraped, and layered in acts of both control and surrender. Defying conventional representation, these paintings unfold like visual sediment: accumulative, temporal, and insistently material.

Yet he never fully abandoned figuration. Among the most resonant works from this period are also among the most intimate. Betty (1988), a strikingly realistic portrait of the artist’s daughter turning away from the viewer, is shown here in charged proximity to October 18, 1977, his austere cycle confronting the deaths of Red Army Faction members in police custody. Rendered in blurred grisaille, these mournful canvases, drawn from press photographs, mark Richter’s most direct engagement with recent German history. On loan from MoMA, the series anchors the exhibition with emotional gravity and moral ambiguity.

Chance and Control

Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau series during the exhibition Gerhard Richter. Neupräsentation im Albertinum in 2015Photo by David Brandt. Courtesy of Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden

The exhibition’s next chapter, covering the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, focuses on Richter’s growing interest in balancing chance and control. In works like 4900 Colors, a chromatic grid made from hundreds of colored panels, and the Cage Paintings (2006), named in tribute to composer John Cage, randomness is shaped with exacting precision. These paintings carry a quiet tension, blending systematic processes with a lyrical, almost musical rhythm.

Other works from this period, including Silikat and his overpainted photographs, continue Richter’s exploration of how images are built up and broken down.

In the final years of his painting practice, Richter produced works of searing intensity. The Birkenau cycle (2014), based on four covert photographs taken inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, transforms the original imagery through a process of layered abstraction. Richter applied and scraped away paint until the photographic source was no longer visible, then created grayscale digital reproductions of the final canvases. The result is a stark meditation on the ethics of representation and the tension between visibility and erasure.

In 2017, Richter announced he would no longer paint, turning to drawing and installation. The exhibition’s final rooms reflect this shift, presenting his Strip Paintings, which are digitally generated from earlier abstractions and extended into continuous bands of color, alongside recent drawings, ink works, and glass sculptures, many on view for the first time.

What makes this show exceptional beyond its scale is its refusal to pin Richter down. This is not so much a showcase of styles as it is a study in shifting perspectives. Richter himself has always resisted labels. “I don't believe in the reality of painting,” he once said. “I use different styles like clothes: it's a way to disguise myself.”