The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is hosting the largest retrospective ever dedicated to Gerhard Richter, showcasing 275 works spanning from 1962 to 2024. The exhibition celebrates the German artist who revolutionized painting after the catastrophes of the Holocaust and World War II, creating a new visual language for the unspeakable. Born in Dresden in 1932 and living in the Rhineland since 1961, Richter has been called a chameleon of German art for his remarkable ability to transform and reinvent his artistic approach.
Curated by Dieter Schwarz and Sir Nicholas Serota, the retrospective clearly demonstrates both the dramatic shifts and consistent themes throughout Richter's six-decade career. The exhibition presents a comprehensive summary of the artist's work, as Richter stopped painting in 2017. The show includes painted works, drawings, watercolors, painted-over photographs, and sculptures made from steel and glass. This marks Richter's return to Paris, where he previously exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in 1977 and the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1993.
The chronologically arranged presentation begins with 'Table' (1962), designated as number one in Richter's catalog despite earlier works, alongside paintings from the era when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and students took to the streets. These works were created long after Richter began his studies at the Dresden Academy in 1951, experienced the pivotal Documenta II in Kassel in 1959, and fled East Germany in 1961. The early paintings draw from family album photographs and illustrated magazines, but Richter transforms these quality sources by removing their sharpness through blurring and overpainting.
Richter's signature technique involves functioning as a filter, working not from nature or live models but from their reproductions, which he repeats while interpretively modifying to create autonomous images. His tools range from brushes of various sizes to palette knives and later implements including planks, with which he scrapes and scratches to make the hidden visible. Initially working exclusively in black, white, and gray in all gradations until gray alone becomes monochrome, color appears only as an exception and heavily restrained.
The early 1970s marked a shift toward more gestural and colorful painting. For 'Park Piece,' Richter used brushes and unexpectedly mixed olive green and burgundy red with gray. His motifs drew from travels to places like Lake Lucerne, Greenland, and Venice, often working from photographs taken during these journeys but painted much later. In Venice, while visiting the Biennale, he discovered a Titian Annunciation that became the subject of an alienation where color detached from the subject, dissolving and becoming independent.
The years 1976 to 1986 represent a breakthrough to an entirely new colorism, as yellow and pink joined gray, green, and red. The previously subdued, matte tones gave way to even shrill neon colors. Simultaneously, he exposed layers of paint applied over one another, creating dialogue between backgrounds and surfaces. Alongside decidedly experimental work, he continued as a landscape painter and still-life artist, appearing almost classical in both genres with motifs like a burning candle or a bottle with an apple from 1989.
The exhibition features works that have become icons over the years, including the nude descending a staircase and the series of 48 portraits based on photographs of famous scientists, writers, and musicians like Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Giacomo Puccini. Among the more than one hundred lenders is New York's Museum of Modern Art, which lent the series 'October 18, 1977' to Paris. This series is based on photographic images of the corpses of Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Gudrun Ensslin - RAF members around Ulrike Meinhof who were found dead in their cells.
Similar to his alienation of photographs of bombers that reduced his birthplace to rubble, contemporary history and current press coverage provide thought-provoking impulses revolving around personal and collective traumas, their repression or processing, and identity. Phase changes in Richter's work are both artistically and biographically motivated. His wives Marianne (called Ema), Isa, and Sabine, as well as his children, motivate scenes of intimacy, while his return to geometric basic forms like spheres serves as starting points for seeking new orientations.
Less explicitly, Richter revisits preoccupations with optical illusions or color fields, with flickering elements disappearing before returning in modified form. The found and then reproduced color chart, a manufacturer's sample sheet, becomes through intermediate steps a composition assembled by random generators though subsequently reworked, finally becoming a procedure. He employed this same method for perhaps his most prominent result: the tall window on the south transept facade of Cologne Cathedral, though this brought him not only approval but also accusations of lack of imagination.
The climax of both Richter's painterly work and the exhibition is set by the four large panels titled 'Birkenau.' In 2014, Richter referenced four historical photographs secretly taken on the grounds of the concentration camp near Auschwitz. He transferred these templates documenting immeasurable horror into completely abstract compositions. Here, the unspeakable becomes the unshowable, representing his ultimate artistic statement about trauma and memory.
The exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton runs until March 2nd, with a catalog available for 49.95 euros. The show attracts not only older visitors who saw previous exhibitions but also a surprisingly young audience, as if witnessing an event that liberates from half-knowledge. The architecturally renowned exhibition space at Bois de Boulogne offers the superlative of the largest Richter retrospective ever shown, drawing from the full scope of the artist's revolutionary career.
