This autumn, the Fondation Louis Vuitton devotes its entire space to one of the most influential artists of our time: Gerhard Richter. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter escaped East Germany in 1961 and settled in Cologne, where he continues to live and work. This important survey exhibition will be presented in Paris from 17 October, 2025 to 2 March 2026.

Following major retrospectives dedicated to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Hockney, the Fondation now honours Richter with a landmark exhibition, its most ambitious to date, featuring 270 works spanning 1962 to 2024.

Paintings, glass and steel sculptures, drawings, watercolours, and overpainted photographs come together to chart six decades of ceaseless reinvention with intense research work and fantastic curation. It’s a momentous show for the German artist!

Richter’s work has always oscillated between figuration and abstraction, memory and material. From early photo-based paintings such as Onkel Rudi and Tante Marianne, personal reflections on family and postwar Germany, to the blurred portraits of the 1970s and the chromatic experiments of the Colour Charts, he has persistently questioned what painting can be.

By the 1980s, his language expanded into pure abstraction. Works like Kerze (1982) and the October 18, 1977 series reveal an artist confronting both beauty and history with unflinching clarity. Later decades saw new dialogues emerge: the meditative Cage Paintings, the algorithmic Strip series, and the monumental Birkenau cycle, transmuting trauma into abstraction. So many substantial works are included in this show.

Structured chronologically, the exhibition traces a life’s work defined by tension and transformation, by doubt as much as mastery. It concludes with Richter’s delicate recent drawings, meditations on time and fragility that mark a new, contemplative phase. More than a retrospective, this is a portrait of an artist who never stopped painting the question itself.

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Image: Gerhard Richter, Cage (6), 2006, Oil on Canvas, 300 x 300 cm Private collection © Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025)