You must cross the forecourt, walk past the water basins and look up at Frank Gehry’s glass sails to realise that the Louis Vuitton Foundation is not merely a museum. It is a living organism, a vessel of glass and light where Gerhard Richter’s work finds a natural echo.

The entire architecture seems, in fact, designed for him. Glass, reflection, the distortion of reality—these are all elements shared by the two artists. Ultimately, Gehry and Richter engage in a dialogue without ever having met. One builds with light; the other paints with doubt. The building, all transparency and flow, embodies what the painter explores pictorially: transparency as promise or illusion, light as active matter, reflection as a distortion of reality, movement as a condition of the gaze. To enter the exhibition is to step into a dialogue between two conceptions of the visible.

Blur, his virtual signature

Since the 1960s, Gerhard Richter has been questioning painting. Painting the world? Painting painting? Both, without ever choosing. His Fotobilder (photo-paintings) depict fragments of the personal and collective history: an uncle in a Nazi uniform (Onkel Rudi, 1965), a blurred bouquet, a bare torso, a vanished house. Richter does not reproduce; he blurs. Blurring, his visual signature, acts as a veil of modesty and a critical weapon. It speaks to the fragility of memory, the distance between image and reality. For him, painting a photograph means questioning the image whilst saving it from falsehood.

Born in Dresden in 1932, trained in Socialist Realism, he grew up amidst propaganda. In 1959, a visit to Documenta II in Kassel introduced him to Pollock, Fontana and Dubuffet. Painting as a free gesture. Two years later, he fled the GDR clandestinely, a few weeks before the Wall was built. This departure was his first work: a refusal of control, a rejection of imposed narrative. His entire practice stems from this: creating counter-images, unstable, unclassifiable, irreducible to any discourse.

Abstraction as an extension

In the 1980s, Richter temporarily abandoned figuration to delve deeper into the material. Using a scraper, he spreads, scrapes and covers. Layers blend and cancel each other out; colours clash and then subside. These Abstrakte Bilder seek neither beauty nor composition; they arise from chance, from a fragile balance between control and chaos, between the painter’s hand and the resistance of the paint itself. In an interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in 1986, he explained: “I don’t make abstract paintings to express something. I want them to be like the world, something that happens, that takes place.” A sentence that perfectly sums up his approach.

For Richter, the world has no contours; it is made up of tensions, superimpositions, contradictions. His abstraction therefore never erases figuration; it extends it in a different way. He has never chosen between painting the world and painting the painting. He moves from a photographic image to an abstract canvas with the same rigour, without ever prioritising one approach over the other. For him, figuration and abstraction are not opposed; they reveal two complementary ways of exploring reality.

When he returns to photography, he transforms it once again. The digital images stretch out, the bands of colour becoming veritable landscapes of pixels. The Strips series pushes the medium to the point of disintegration. Richter is fully present here, a painter of active doubt who mistrusts the visible yet never ceases to work with it.

At the Fondation Louis Vuitton, this tension takes shape. In the light-filled galleries, the Abstrakte Bilder breathe in time with the building. Light glides over the canvases, casting shifting reflections. Every minute transforms the colours, as if the painting were still taking shape before our eyes. In the darker rooms, the Fotobilder assert themselves in an atmosphere of withdrawal. The dim light accentuates the blurriness, making it almost tactile. These faces, these gestures, these photographed memories become suspended presences. Richter paints memory as one paints an absence. At the culmination of the exhibition, his glass works: 3 Scheiben (2023), three transparent, reflective panels standing in the space. Neither painting nor sculpture, but an experience of the gaze. Here, the viewer discovers their own reflection, that of the building, and of other visitors. Reality breaks down, overlaps, and blurs. Richter no longer shows the world; he reflects it.

A body of work in perpetual motion

At 93, Gerhard Richter no longer stands before the canvas. He put away his brushes in 2017, but he has not ceased to question the visible. Now, he works differently. The gaze has taken over from the hand. His recent works—drawings, digital prints, glass or mirrored surfaces—continue his exploration of perception, chance and light. Painting is no longer his tool, but his cast shadow. Everything he creates today bears its mark, its slowness, its gravity.

Though Richter no longer paints, he continues to explore the interplay between the visible and the real. His body of work, which was thought to be complete, remains a field of experimentation where light, memory and doubt engage in dialogue without hierarchy. The exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton demonstrates this: far from a static tribute, it shows an artist still thinking, still shifting the boundaries between image and perception. On leaving, the glass and light of Frank Gehry’s building silently extend this reflection. Everything seems to keep shifting: the space, the works, the gaze itself. Richter, at 93, no longer paints, but he has never stopped teaching us to see.

An article by Désirée de Lamarzelle. Read it in issue 14 of Oniriq Magazine.

Translated by Bethszabee Garner