From October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026, the Fondation Louis Vuitton will present a major retrospective of works by Gerhard Richter — one of the most influential contemporary artists — born in Dresden in 1932. He fled East Germany for Düsseldorf in 1961 before settling in Cologne, where he currently lives and works.
Continuing its tradition of landmark monographic exhibitions devoted to leading figures of 20th and 21st-century art — including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Hockney — the Fondation Louis Vuitton will dedicate all 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 an exceptional 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. For the first time, an exhibition will offer a comprehensive view of over six decades of Gerhard Richter's creation - an artist whose greatest joy has always been working in his studio.
Gerhard Richter, Apfelbäume [Appletree], 1987 (CR 650-1) Oil on canvas, 67 x 92 cm Private collection © Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025)
Gerhard Richter has always been drawn to both subject matter and the very language of painting — a field of experimentation whose boundaries he has continually pushed, avoiding any singular categorization. His training at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts led him to engage with traditional genres such as still life, portraiture, landscape, and history painting. His desire to reinterpret these genres through a contemporary lens lies at the heart of this exhibition. Regardless of subject, Richter never paints directly from nature or from the scene before him: every image is filtered through an intermediary medium — through a photograph or a drawing,— from which he constructs a new, autonomous work. Over time, he has explored an extraordinary range of genres and techniques within painting, developing various methods of applying paint to canvas — whether with a brush, a palette knife, or a squeegee.
The exhibition brings together many of Richter's most significant works up to his decision in 2017 to stop painting, while continuing to draw. Presented in chronological order, each section spans approximately a decade and traces the evolution of a singular pictorial vision — one shaped by both rupture and continuity — from his early photo-based paintings to his final abstractions.
Born in Dresden in 1932 in the then East Germany, Richter fled the GDR just before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. He settled in Düsseldorf and later in Cologne, where he still lives and works today.
From 1951 to 1956, he studied mural painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1961, he left for Düsseldorf, where from 1961 to 1964 he studied painting under K.O. Götz at the State Academy of Fine Arts. Some 10 years later, he became a professor of painting there, a position he held until 1994. Starting in 1962, while still a student, he developed his own artistic practice, initially based on photographic models and later exploring a wide variety of abstract language. Alongside his canvases and objects, Richter's complex body of work also includes drawings, watercolors, overpainted photos, editions and multiples.
Gerhard Richter is unanimously regarded as one of the most important and influential living artists. His works are held in major museum collections and have been exhibited worldwide. Since 1967, Richter's work has been exhibited in France by institutions and galleries, including retrospectives at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1999 and more recently at the Centre Pompidou in 2012.
Main Image: Gerhard Richter, Lesende [Woman reading], 1994 (CR 804) Oil on canvas, 72 x 102 cm Collection SFMOMA © Gerhard Richter 2025 (18102025)