From October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026, the Fondation Louis Vuitton will present a major retrospective of Gerhard Richter, widely regarded as one of the most important and internationally celebrated artists of his generation.
Born in 1932, Richter was featured in the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s inaugural presentation in 2014 with works from the Collection. Now, the Fondation will dedicate all its galleries to the artist with a retrospective, unmatched in scale and chronological scope. Covering 1962 to 2024, the exhibition of 275 works—oil paintings, glass and steel sculptures, pencil and ink drawings, watercolors, and overpainted photographs—offers, for the first time, a comprehensive view of Richter’s creation over six decades.
Richter has always been drawn to both subject matter and the language of painting, continually pushing boundaries and avoiding categorization. His training at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts led him to engage with traditional genres—still life, portraiture, landscape, and history painting. His desire to reinterpret these genres through a contemporary lens is at the heart of this exhibition.
Regardless of subject, Richter never paints directly from nature or from the scene before him: every image is filtered through an intermediary medium—photograph or a drawing—from which he constructs a new, autonomous work.
The exhibition gathers many of Richter’s most significant works up to his 2017 decision to stop painting, while continuing to draw. Presented chronologically, each section spans a decade and traces the evolution of a singular vision—shaped by rupture and continuity—from early photo-based paintings to final abstractions.
Gallery 1: 1962–1970—Painting from Photographs: Photography as a Source of Imagery
From the outset, Richter’s choice of subject was complex—mundane images sourced from newspapers or family photographs tied to his own past—(Uncle Rudi and Aunt Marianne) and to shadows of German history, as in Bombers. By mid-1960s, Richter was challenging the conventions of illusionistic painting with sculptures such as Four Panels of Glass and his first Color Charts. In his Cityscapes, he experimented with a pseudo-expressionist impasto technique, and in Landscapes and Seascapes, he revisited traditional genres, reinterpreting them through the intermediary of photography and challenging their painterly conventions.
Gallery 2: 1971–1975—Investigating Representation
The 48 Portraits, painted for the 1972 Venice Biennale, mark a new chapter in which Richter interrogates the nature of painting through his blur technique (Vermalung); the copying and dissolution of a Titian Annunciation; the random distribution of color in the large Color Charts; and the rejection of representation and expression in the Grey Paintings.
Gallery 4: 1976–1986—Exploring Abstraction
Richter developed his distinctive approach to abstraction: enlarging watercolors, examining the painted surface, and making the brushstroke itself the subject (Strich). He also painted the first portraits of his daughter Betty and continued exploring traditional subjects such as landscape and still life.
Gallery 5: 1987–1995—Sombre Reflections
Motivated by skepticism toward artistic and social change, Richter created October 18, 1977 — exceptionally on loan from MoMA—his only body of work explicitly referencing recent German history. This period also produced striking abstract works and the family-centered series Sabine with Child.
Galleries 7 and 9: 1996–2009—New Perspectives in painting: Chance
In the late 1990s, Richter entered a highly productive period, creating small figurative and abstract works, the austere Silicate series, experiments with chance culminating in 4900 Colors and the meditative Cage paintings, a tribute to John Cage.
Galleries 9 and 10: 2009–2017—Final Paintings
Richter abandoned painting for several years to experiment with glass works and digitally generated Strip images. He returned with Birkenau, a group of works inspired by 4 photographs taken inside a Nazi extermination camp. The final room of paintings presents his last masterful abstract canvases completed in 2017, after which Richter’s attention has focused on the drawings shown in Gallery 11.
Fondation Louis Vuitton
President: Bernard Arnault
Advisor to the President, Administrator: Jean-Paul Claverie
Artistic Director: Suzanne Pagé
Executive Director: Sophie Durrleman
Guest curators: Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota