Germany’s acclaimed painter eludes categorization
VIP passes to the Fondation Louis Vuitton are available on request at the Sotheby’s Paris reception desk. Please note, for extremely popular exhibitions, we can only issue a maximum of two tickets per Preferred member.
The continually evolving practice of Gerhard Richter, one of Germany’s most prominent artists, crosses styles and subjects. Now in his nineties, the venerable artist has famously varied his approach and medium, experimenting with abstraction and figuration across glass and steel sculpture, pencil and ink drawings, and watercolors, alongside his more well-known paintings on canvas. A major retrospective of 270 artworks spanning six decades of Richter’s artistic investigation goes on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, organized in collaboration with the artist. Presented chronologically, the exhibition begins with the photo-based paintings of the 1960s that incorporate his signature blur technique, used to give a ghostly treatment to otherwise photorealistic, monochromatic works. Other highlights include “48 Portraits,” a series of individual depictions of historical figures created for the 1972 Venice Biennale; his first portraits of his daughter Betty; monumental abstract works using a squeegee; and his “Birkenau” series, a group of paintings inspired by four photographs secretly taken inside a Nazi extermination camp in 1944. A self-described “maker of images” with a suspicion of images and the reality they present, Richter doesn’t paint from life, instead choosing to mediate his works through a source photograph drawn from his vast photo archive, known as his “Atlas.” “Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures,” Richter wrote in his “Notes” from 1964–65. Rather, a good picture “takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.”
Gerhard Richter, “Lesende,” 1994. © Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025)
