Gerhard Richter | Fondation Louis Vuitton
I find it impossible to write a summary of the hours I spent at this exhibition: a whole-career survey of Gerhard Richter. Only an institution of this size - the enormous ship-like Fondation Louis Vuitton, stranded at the edge of Paris - could have attempted such a thing, considering the awesome, restless, relentless variety of his artistic output.
So, I give up. Instead I present Wald (3), from 1990, in the early days of Richter’s trademark squeegee-produced abstracts. Then again, Richter has had countless trademarks: from the blurred black and white reproduced photo-paintings, to his random squares of colour, to his deliberately banal landscapes, to his white period, to his most recent obsessively-demarked daily drawings. His astonishing Baader-Meinhof and Birkenau cycles. And so on, and so on.
The forest has fascinated generations of German artists. Richter’s is characteristically off-kilter. Dark and deep and banal at once. Its dark blues and yellows glitter with an evil energy. The kind of energy that powered all of those reinventions over all of those decades. (Richter’s first catalogued work - on show of course in Paris - was in 1962; he still draws every day.)
The exhibition was unforgettable. I felt pulverised afterwards. Obliterated. Unable to see more - or see past his greatness when looking at others. I made the mistake of seeing the Richter show on my first day in Paris. Later, I wandered around other exhibitions, in private and public galleries, of Richter’s contemporaries like Pierre Soulages or Richard Serra or Daniel Buren. He made those others look hopelessly static and stuck.
Gerhard Richter is at Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris). 17 October 2025 - 02 March 2026