Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris:
"Gerhard Richter"
October 17, 2025 - March 03, 2026
From October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026, the Fondation Louis Vuitton will present a major retrospective of works by Gerhard Richter—one of the most influential contemporary artists—born in Dresden in 1932. He fled East Germany for Düsseldorf in 1961 before settling in Cologne, where he currently lives and works.
Continuing its tradition of landmark monographic exhibitions devoted to leading figures of 20th and 21st-century art — including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Hockney — the Fondation will dedicate all its galleries to Gerhard Richter, widely regarded as one of the most important and internationally celebrated artists of his generation.
Gerhard Richter was featured in the inaugural presentation of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2014, with a group of works from the Collection. Now, the Fondation is honoring the artist with an exceptional retrospective — unmatched both in scale and in chronological scope — featuring 270 works stretching from 1962 to 2024. The exhibition includes oil paintings, glass and steel sculptures, pencil and ink drawings, watercolors, and overpainted photographs. For the first time, an exhibition will offer a comprehensive view of over six decades of Gerhard Richter’s creation - an artist whose greatest joy has always been working in his studio.
Gerhard Richter has always been drawn to both subject matter and the very language of painting — a field of experimentation whose boundaries he has continually pushed, avoiding any singular categorization. His training at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts led him to engage with traditional genres such as still life, portraiture, landscape, and history painting. His desire to reinterpret these genres through a contemporary lens lies 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 — through a photograph or a drawing — from which he constructs a new, autonomous work. Over time, he has explored an extraordinary range of genres and techniques within painting, developing various methods of applying paint to canvas — whether with a brush, a palette knife, or a squeegee.
The exhibition brings together many of Richter’s most significant works up to his decision in 2017 to stop painting, while continuing to draw. Presented in chronological order, each section spans approximately a decade and traces the evolution of a singular pictorial vision — one shaped by both rupture and continuity — from his early photo-based paintings to his final abstractions.
