Nicholas Serota, the former director of Tate, will co-curate a vast retrospective of works by the influential German artist Gerhard Richter this autumn at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (17 October-2 March 2026).
“[The Fondation] is honouring the artist with an exceptional retrospective, unmatched both in scale and in chronological scope, featuring 270 works stretching from 1962 to 2024,” says a statement. Works in a variety of media, from paintings to pencil and ink drawings, watercolours, and overpainted photographs, will go on show.
The show launches with a section dedicated to works dating from 1962 to 1970 under the heading “Painting from Photographs: Photography as a Source of Imagery”, referencing family photographs linked to the artist’s past such as Uncle Rudi and Aunt Marianne.
The next room will focus on the works created for the 1972 Venice Biennale. In these works, a statement says, “Richter interrogates the nature of painting in multiple ways: through the use of his signature blur technique (Vermalung) [and] the progressive copying and dissolution of a Titian Annunciation”.
Gerhard Richter, Gudrun, 1987
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © Gerhard Richter 2025
The chronological thread continues in rooms focused on works dating from 1976 to 1986 (“Exploring abstraction”) and 1987 to 1995 (“Sombre Reflections”). The latter will include the October 18, 1977 series which is described by its lender, the Museum of Modern Art in New York as evoking “fragments from the lives and deaths of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group”.
The final part of the exhibition (2009 to 2023) explores how Richter abandoned painting for several years to experiment with glass works, while also producing digitally generated Strip images.
The Art Newspaper understands that key pieces from the Foundation’s own collection, such as Gudrun (1987), Wald [Forest] (1990) and 4900 Farben [4900 couleurs], will be included. Examples of loans include Verkündigung nach Tizian [Annonciation d’après le Titien], 1973, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Abstraktes Bild [Tableau abstrait], 1978, from the Tate and Betty (1977) on loan from Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
In 2011, Nicholas Serota, currently the chair of Arts Council England, organised a Richter show at Tate Modern in London entitled Gerhard Richter: Panorama. At the time, Serota told The Art Newspaper: “I’ve had a passionate interest in Richter for many years.
“I did a show at the Whitechapel in 1979, and the more I watched and learned, the more I studied the processes and the outcomes, the more impressive his work is. I’m astounded by the thoroughness with which he investigates every problem that he tackles, and also the number of levels of meaning in the work.”
Dieter Schwarz, the director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur from 1990 to 2017, is also co-curator. The Richter show is the latest in a string of blockbuster monographic exhibitions at Fondation Louis Vuitton devoted to key figures of 20th- and 21st-century art such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko and David Hockney.
Richter’s auction record stands at £30.4m, the price paid for the large-scale abstract painting Abstraktes Bild (1986) which sold at Sotheby’s London in 2015.
