Coinciding with Art Basel Paris, the Fondation Louis Vuitton has opened a major retrospective of Gerhard Richter (17 October 2025–2 March 2026). Bringing together more than 270 works from 1962 to 2024, the exhibition traces six decades of a practice that persistently interrogates what painting can still mean in an image-saturated world. Richter’s shifts between photo-based realism and abstraction read less as stylistic restlessness than as sustained skepticism: if painting can no longer deliver truth, what can it do?
Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter came of age amid devastation. Trained in East Germany under Socialist Realism, he fled to the West in 1961, just before the Berlin Wall was erected. That rupture, between ideologies, histories, and modes of seeing, permeates his work, and the retrospective reads less as a celebration than as a careful examination of the doubts, instincts, and evasions that define his practice.
The earliest rooms set the tone. Tisch (1962) and Uncle Rudi (1965) introduce the artist’s now-canonical blur, a technique that softens photographic precision until the image seems to retreat into itself. The blur is not decorative; it is a refusal. By smearing the surface, Richter denies both the camera’s claim to accuracy and the painter’s claim to revelation. His portraits and domestic scenes oscillate between presence and erasure, between knowing and not knowing. Even Betty (1988), that famous image of his daughter turning away, resists intimacy. It withholds, and in doing so becomes a portrait of seeing itself.
As the exhibition unfolds, this distrust of representation transforms into formal experiment. By the 1980s Richter’s practice had grown monumental, defined by his use of the squeegee, a long blade dragged across the canvas to scrape, smear and reveal layered fields of colour. What appears gestural is, in fact, the residue of process: paint applied, removed, reapplied, scraped again. Each surface carries its own archaeology. The result is both physical and elusive, like sediment disturbed by movement. Standing before these works, one senses a collapse of categories: chance and control, precision and accident, image and object. The squeegee paintings are not about abstraction as a style but as a condition, they are essentially an attempt to find meaning in what resists depiction.
This sense of uncertainty is amplified in works such as October 18, 1977 (1988), Richter’s response to the Baader-Meinhof group’s suicide in Stammheim prison. Rendered in grey tones and blurred into near illegibility, the cycle transforms reportage into elegy. The political becomes personal; memory becomes residue. At the Fondation, the series anchors the mid-section of the show like a moral hinge. Here the act of painting approaches mourning: the image as both witness and failure. The final rooms are dominated by Richter’s Birkenau paintings (2014). Based on smuggled photographs taken inside Auschwitz, the works translate horror into abstraction, photographs digitally transferred to canvas and then painted over until nothing remains visible. The gesture is not evasive but ethical. Faced with the unrepresentable, Richter paints absence itself. The surfaces pulse with colour and density but retain the silence of what they conceal. In the museum’s glass-and-steel architecture, the paintings appear almost self-conscious: the unsayable held within a building designed for spectacle.
It’s impossible to ignore the context of Art Basel Paris happening alongside the Retrospective’s opening. Richter’s presence in both museum and market spaces underlines the paradox of contemporary visibility. In 2015, Abstraktes Bild (599) (1986) sold for £30.4 million at Sotheby’s London, still cited as the artist’s most expensive work. That a single squeegee abstraction commands such value while his retrospective examines the instability of images speaks volumes about the art system’s capacity to monetise doubt. Yet the Fondation’s presentation resists easy cynicism. It reminds viewers that Richter’s project has never been about mastery or commodity; it’s about the friction between looking and believing.
What makes the exhibition resonate now is not its scale but its timeliness. Richter’s scepticism feels contemporary in an age of AI-generated images and algorithmic clarity. His refusal to trust appearances, his insistence that every image carries the trace of its own distortion, aligns eerily with our present condition. His paintings become about time, doubt, and distance. Where digital culture promises transparency, Richter offers blur and abstraction. Where the market prizes immediacy, he insists on hesitation.
Walking through the Fondation’s luminous corridors, one notices how the light itself becomes part of the work. The glass architecture refracts and distorts, echoing the artist’s own manipulations. Each reflection folds the viewer into the image. The effect is both intimate and alienating: a space of contemplation inside an architectural spectacle. Richter’s retrospective thus becomes a kind of mirror, of the institutional structures that frame both his paintings and perception itself. The cumulative impression is not of progress but of persistence. Richter’s career, seen in full, reads less as a series of breakthroughs than as an ongoing argument with vision. His shifts between photo-based realism and abstraction are less stylistic restlessness than sustained skepticism. The paintings do not resolve this argument; they prolong it. In a culture addicted to clarity, Richter insists on opacity; in a world of information, he defends uncertainty.
At the Fondation Louis Vuitton, amid the gleam of Gehry’s architecture and the hum of Art Basel Paris, this insistence feels quietly radical. The retrospective does not prescribe how to see. It demonstrates that seeing is an act, unstable and inherently political. It does not reconcile contradictions; it displays them, in all their unresolved force.
