Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France
October 17, 2025–March 2, 2026
The Fondation Louis Vuitton presents a major retrospective of works by Gerhard Richter, offering a comprehensive view of over six decades of the artist's practice. Continuing its tradition of landmark monographic exhibitions devoted to leading figures of 20th and 21st-century art—including Joan Mitchell, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Rothko, and David Hockney—the Fondation Louis Vuitton will dedicate all of 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 Louis Vuitton is honoring the artist with a 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.
Each section of the exhibition, arranged chronologically, covers approximately a decade and shows the evolution of a singular pictorial vision, between ruptures and continuities, from his early paintings based on photographs to his latest abstractions.
Major early works include 48 Portraits, painted for the 1972 Venice Biennale and marking the start of his application of the process of drips (Vermalungen). Among numerous important works included are the series October 18, 1977, on special loan from MoMA, New York, and the only group of works by the artist to explicitly refer to recent German history at the time. Also included are major works from the end of the 1990s, in which Richter entered a very productive period that led him from small-scale figurative and abstract paintings to the severe Silikat, to experiments with chance that resulted in 4900 Colors (2007).
In 2017, Richter announced that he would abandon painting to experiment with works on glass as well as digitally produced images of the Strip. The final room of the exhibition features his final masterful abstract canvases, completed in 2017, after which Richter focused on drawings, which are also included in the exhibition. Sculptures are also included, as well as three rooms dedicated to watercolors, drawings, and overpainted photographs.
Learn more at Fondation Louis Vuitton.
