Gerhard Richter

Characterized by an impressive variation in scope, scale, and technique, the works on view in Paris collectively highlight Richter’s expansive understanding of the painted medium and his endlessly investigative approach to the process of artmaking itself. The exhibition opens with the artist’s 3 Scheiben (3 Panes of Glass), from 2023. Richter first began working with the medium of glass over half a century ago, with his landmark 1967 installation 4 Glasscheiben (4 Panes of Glass), which he conceived of as a response to The Large Glass (1915–1923) by Marcel Duchamp.

The present installation belongs to a later body of work comprising groups of freestanding transparent glass panes. When viewed head-on, the image visible through the glass becomes increasingly distorted, dimmed, and opaque as it passes through each successive panel, forming a potent corollary to the blurred effect of Richter’s photo paintings, which the artist began experimenting with in the 1960s.

Also on view are additional wall-mounted glass installations. As with all of Richter’s glass works, these pieces acknowledge and defy the expected artistic role of glass as a protective shield devoid of its own material presence, while also freeing it from its traditional modernist constraints as a setting within walls, vitrines, or cubes. The experience of beholding these works—along with the images seen on their surfaces—enacts a radical paradox in which reality is both rendered impassable through its physical mirroring and distortion, while also being perfectly emulated with an indelible proximity to the real world.

The exhibition includes a selection of Richter’s Fotobilder (Photo Paintings), such as Blumen (Flowers, 1992), Torso (1997), and Kl. Badende (Small Bather, 1994). Beginning as early as 1962, at the outset of his career, Richter made use of photographic imagery as the source material for his paintings. His first canvases depicted images taken from advertisements, the news media, and other mass-reproduced sources, in addition to personal family photographs and ordinary snapshots.

Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings) explore painting’s formal and conceptual possibilities from another angle. Carefully constructed and highly stratified in composition, these works use abstraction to foreground the sheer physical presence of paint and color—a method of artistic creation that is aleatory yet deliberately planned.

Among the Abstract Paintings on view in Paris is an example from 2001, which features intersecting swaths of vibrant pink, green, and golden yellow. With the expansive planes of harmonious color, the earlier works stand in contrast to Richter’s last oil paintings from 2015 to 2017, which are characterized by energetic markings laid atop one another in intricate, dimensional formations.

The exhibition at our Paris location coincides with the opening of a major solo presentation of Richter’s work at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. This exceptional retrospective—unmatched both in scale and in chronological scope—features 270 works stretching from 1962 to 2024, including oil paintings, glass and steel sculptures, pencil and ink drawings, watercolors, and overpainted photographs.

The Abstract Paintings are further juxtaposed in Paris with a four-meter-wide Strip painting from 2024; digitally derived from the Abstract Paintings, Richter’s Strips orchestrate a dialogue between painting, photography, print reproduction, and abstraction. Each work comprises a unique digital print face-mounted to Perspex acrylic glass, lending an inherently reflective quality to the surface and removing all traces of the artist’s hand.

Crucially, Richter conceives of the Strips as "paintings" despite their digital genesis—thereby positioning these works at a philosophical nexus in which they reflect on both the historical implications of painting as well as its uncertain future in a technocratic age.

Also on view in Paris are recent drawings by Richter—including new works as well as ones that were featured in the exhibition Gerhard Richter: 81 Drawings, 1 Strip Painting, 1 Edition at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, earlier this year. Works on paper have constituted a significant element of Richter’s practice throughout his career. As early as the 1960s, these compositions have displayed his interest in the fundamental parameters and ramifications of markmaking.

The medium of drawing took on a newfound importance within Richter’s oeuvre after he stopped making oil paintings in 2017. Constituting a more prolific and significant element of his practice, these works—typically made with ink or graphite and colored pencil—allow him to explore another aspect of the role of the artist’s hand in the creation of a dynamic and abstract pictorial narrative. As Richter describes, these works on paper chart out a parallel but complementary path to his painted oeuvre, much like that of “a poem and a novel by the same author.”

Many of these later drawings feature passages of cloudy graphite rubbings juxtaposed with equally hazy semi-erased portions. The artist embeds a sparse network of crisscrossing arcs and lines amongst this backdrop, forming an enigmatic topography that seems to map out the very possibilities of imagemaking itself. Other drawings are composed of abstract monochrome washes of ink and graphite, taking on a decisively painterly appearance.