“When one paints, thought is painting”: this is how Gerhard Richter describes his art. A painting without limits, ever - evolving, in which images reflect the world without ever fixing it permanently - just like thought itself. Through March 2nd, the Fondation Louis Vuitton presents a major retrospective dedicated to the German artist. Organized as a chronological journey (275 works from 1962 to 2024), the exhibition occupies the entire museum space designed by architect Frank Gehry. Born in Dresden in 1932, trained in East Germany, and having fled to Düsseldorf in 1961, Gerhard Richter embodies the transition between the art of the second half of the 20th century and that of the 21st. His classical training, combined with a constant questioning of pictorial language, has led him to occupy a unique position in contemporary art history. Richter does not adhere to specific movements or styles: his work traverses traditional genres (portraiture, landscape, still life, history painting), filtering them through photographs and drawings - often blurred or softened to the point of indeterminacy and indecipherability. In his work, the image is never a mere copy of reality, but an autonomous construction, laden with ambiguity. His oeuvre moves between figuration and abstraction, memory and erasure, control and chance, always maintaining a critical distance that makes every image both present and elusive. The exhibition retraces the main periods of his research. The 1960s and 70s are represented by early works based on photographs, such as Tisch (1962), Onkel Rudi (1965), or Ema (Nu sur un escalier) (1966), where the flou becomes a tool for memory and loss. These are followed by the experiments of the 1970s with the Verkündigungen nach Tizian and the 48 Portraits, which challenge the nature of representation. The 1980s saw the emergence of his large abstractions and still lifes, such as Kerze (1982) and Lilak (1982). In the 1990s, intimate and reflective works like Lesende (1994) and Autoportrait (1996) appear. The new millennium is marked by fundamental cycles such as Cage (2006), 4900 Farben (2007), and September (2005), leading to the extreme outcome of Birkenau (2014), where painting confronts the very impossibility of representing the Shoah. The final rooms of the exhibition present recent drawings, evidence of a quest that continues beyond painting, leaving the viewer with a space of silence, doubt, and suspended truth.
