Parisian Colours II: Richter

This article, following the color approach dedicated to a series of recent Parisian exhibitions, is the fourth in a series commissioned by the ICA. It is entirely devoted to the Gerhard Richter retrospective held at the Fondation Louis Vuitton from October 17, 2025, to March 2, 2026.

The Parisian exhibition is unfortunately over, but the artist, who announced in 2017 that he would stop painting, continues to exhibit. This is evidenced by his 100 Works for Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie and the exhibition Landschaften presented at David Zwirner Gallery in New York since May 7, 2026.

This retrospective was exceptional: nearly 270 works created between 1962 and 2024, a beautifully orchestrated chronological hanging in Frank Gehry’s spectacular architecture, and a remarkable synthesis of the artist’s multiple explorations. One moves from the figurative universe to the abstract, from a researcher of color and light to an artist who draws inspiration from the Old Masters, from family photographs, or from the depths of his own being. One is consistently struck by his technical mastery and the originality of his approach.

Almost all the reproductions presented in this article are personal photographs taken during the exhibition. Links to museums and galleries also allow you to discover the works in a more official context.

In order to conclude the Colors in Paris cycle, I will later devote an article to the Cherqui Foundation.

Richter at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

Is Richter intentionally blurring the tracks to remain impossible to categorize? He is truly an artist who defies all classification, whether through the diversity of genres he tackles, his techniques, or the formats he chooses. Yet, if you know his work even a little, you can instantly recognize his hand in most of his pieces, even if you’ve never seen them before.

Blurring the Lines

What a profusion of means! At times, Richter radically shifts his pictorial technique even within a single work.

Take Hirsch (Deer, 1963) for instance. Painted from a personal black-and-white photograph, it depicts a memory from Dresden, dating from before his move to the West. Richter does not limit himself to a single range of greys: the deer is rendered in cooler tones that set it apart from its surroundings. The graphic treatment differs as well — the animal is almost sculptural, modeled with volume, while the forest is suggested by simple black outlines on a relatively flat background. Only a few branches have any real substance; the rest are mere signs indicating a forest.

It is worth noting that in the David Zwirner version, the greys in the modelling of the deer take on an exaggerated bluish tone, as though the entire image had been corrected to assign a perfectly neutral value to the surrounding forest.

This contrast in treatment perfectly captures the nature of memory: in such an encounter in the woods, only the wild animal truly matters, while the trees remain secondary, almost incidental. Depicting the forest with schematic lines and the deer in volume therefore makes perfect sense.

However, one element disrupts the reading of the painting: a large tree trunk cuts across the image, partially obscuring the deer’s body. This trunk is both transparent — like all the trees in this symbolic forest — and opaque where it passes in front of the animal. This visual paradox inevitably recalls René Magritte’s The Blank Signature (Le Blanc-Seing, 1965).

Is Richter seeking to underline the fragmentation of memory, or the impossibility of fully accessing the recollection of the event?

From Photography to Painting: Inverting the Codes

In his photo-paintings, Gerhard Richter takes a diametrically opposed approach to that of the Pictorialists, the photographer-artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eager to establish photography as a legitimate art form, the Pictorialists tried to emulate painting through noble subjects, carefully composed scenes, and pictorial atmospheres, often intervening manually during development or retouching prints.

Richter does the exact opposite. He deliberately seeks out banal, uncomposed photographs — often amateur snapshots, newspaper images, magazines, or encyclopedic sources. His aim is not to beautify the image but to preserve its cold, almost impersonal neutrality.

This pictorial archive has been meticulously documented since 1962. Since then, the artist has continuously enriched it, eventually granting it the status of a work of art in 1972 under the name Atlas, the basis for his photo-paintings.

All Subjects, All Styles

Who would have dared — except perhaps during the Covid period — to take a roll of toilet paper as a subject? A clear nod to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, Richter painted Klorolle in 1965, shortly after visiting the Duchamp retrospective at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, an exhibition that left a deep impression on him.

In Klorolle, the paint is smoothed across the entire surface, creating its characteristic blurred effect. By contrast, in Himalaya (1968), everything is sharp. There are no gradients. Hard, strongly defined shadows structure the image in a dynamic diagonal composition. The change in style is radical.

In Clouds, painted the same year, the artist uses distinct square brushstrokes placed side by side. One finds both warm and cool greys, but no gradients. Everything moves away from the cliché of a cloud. Doesn’t it look more like shimmering light on the sea? Perhaps he is evoking a sea of clouds?

We are thus unable to identify any single characteristic style, even within this series of grey photo-paintings. Richter constantly eludes our desire to categorize him. Is this a concern for neutrality, a deliberate distance from his subject, or from us, the viewers?

The Quest for Neutrality

Yet, in Aunt Marianne (1965), this pursuit of neutrality seems to fail. The pyramidal composition created by the large white mass enveloping the aunt and her nephew inevitably evokes the aesthetic codes of Renaissance Madonnas and Child.

Although Richter asserts that he wanted to remain distant from this tragic memory — his schizophrenic aunt, who was institutionalized and later euthanized by the Nazis —, the sacred dimension of the relationship unconsciously makes its way through. The film Werk ohne Autor (Never Look Away), already mentioned in the “Why Grey?” challenge, captures this tension particularly well.

The Back View Portrait

The portrait is a genre in its own right in the history of art. Some artists had dared to depict their model from behind, but showing the figure with their head turned away from the painter, as if in a deliberate movement, was something entirely new before Gerhard Richter’s photo-painting Betty (1988).

This work — in color this time — once again demonstrates his desire to break the codes. It is not, moreover, the only portrait of his daughter Betty in the retrospective. Two earlier ones are painted in very different styles, as if he felt the need to break the previous code each time.

Twenty years after his first photo-paintings, and beyond the shift from black and white to color, the technique itself had evolved significantly. Previously, large brushstrokes over the subject were enough to create the blur. Betty (1988), by contrast, gives the illusion of photographic precision through subtle variations in blur and sharpness. Rather than a fixed focal point, the image seems to shift its focus somewhere between the painter and the model — perhaps even onto a fold in the garment — creating a quiet sense of instability and distance. One senses the artist’s mastery and precision.

Natalie Arsenow, known for reinterpreting iconic portraits from art history with colored pencils, has made Betty her own. Like many other artists, she has also frequently adopted the back-view portrait in her personal work.

Constraint and Chance

At several points in his career, Richter deliberately imposed strict constraints on himself. For the 1972 Venice Biennale, one key self-imposed rule was to adapt his work to the neoclassical architecture of the German Pavilion in the creation of 48 Portraits of famous men born between 1824 and 1904. Additional constraints included using only documentary photographs in a strictly uniform style, sourced from dictionaries or encyclopedias, and following a rigorous protocol: painting two portraits per day. The number 48 itself appears to have been significant, echoing the color charts he had developed in the 1970s.

Industrial Color Charts

How can one neutralize the emotional power of color? Eliminate any trace of the brushstroke, create perfectly flat surfaces with no accidents, apply industrially coded colors onto standardized supports, without composition — nothing but orderly rows and columns, like shelves in a store. In short, by reproducing industrial color charts and elevating them to the status of artworks through a change of scale and support, in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades.

At the exhibition, one of these color charts is displayed behind a sculpture consisting of four transparent glass panels that can pivot on a horizontal axis. Depending on the angle of the panels, the viewer’s own reflection merges into the scene. A subtle disturbance of reality thus slips into the viewer’s space — a concept that recurs frequently throughout the artist’s work.

Fabricated Color Charts

In a later phase, Richter began producing his own colors through a systematic process. He explains it as follows: “The starting point consists of the four pure colors — red, yellow, green and blue. Their intermediate shades and degrees of luminosity give rise to combinations of 16, 64, 256 and 1024 colors. It would be pointless to use more colors, as they would be impossible to distinguish clearly.” Thus, in 4096 Colors, only 1024 shades are used, but each one is deployed four times. The position of each shade, however, is assigned at random.

The painting is therefore entirely the result of a strict protocol in which randomness intervenes only at the very end.

Is this desire to eradicate all emotion not ultimately pointless? Don’t these color charts nevertheless reveal the painter’s deep fascination with color — like that of a child receiving their first box of crayons? A primal emotion from which the artist has nonetheless tried to erase himself.

The Reign of Grey

In the 1970s, this approach, pushed to its extreme, led Richter to paint entirely grey canvases. He wrote: “Grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent of indifference, non-commitment, and the absence of opinion.”

Grey, the neutral color par excellence. Without any composition, the painting says nothing. Or does it? Perhaps the texture and the material still convey something of the fluctuations of the void that inhabited him.

Although these paintings appear neutral, they nevertheless reveal his state of mind. When he created them, he was going through a profound personal crisis: weariness of photo-painting, a sense of impasse, and deep depression. Grey became for him a gesture of self-destruction or renunciation. Yet, with hindsight, Richter would later acknowledge the importance of this exploration of grey. By continuing to work and confront his own darkness, he eventually found a form of satisfaction in it (see the “Why Grey?” challenge), and managed to emerge from it.

The Color Explosion

Having thus pushed the pursuit of neutrality to its extreme through monochrome grey paintings, Richter makes a complete 180-degree turn. At last, color explodes!

My personal favorite? The watercolors he created in 1984, particularly the Colmar series, inspired by Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. These dynamic compositions, the vibrancy of the colors, the rich texture created by the interaction between ink and oil pastels, and the modesty of the support — everything delights me in this body of work. I must admit I don’t clearly see the connection with the Isenheim Altarpiece. But the idea that a painting from the 16th century can still inspire artists four hundred years later is truly delightful.

Abstraction

Here is what Richter wrote about his new approach to abstraction: “In 1976, I began with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do something I had never permitted myself before: to put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it could never be truly random. It was a way of opening a door for myself. Chance as theme and method. I want to arrive at an image I had not foreseen.”

This abstraction would later be pushed to an extreme form of minimalism and systematization. The abstract painting 724-4 from 1990 was scanned in 2011 and then digitally divided according to a precise iterative process: split into increasingly fine vertical strips, before being reassembled. This gave birth to the Strip series — large digital prints composed of colored bands, often more than four meters long.

Painting or creating according to a process that is both tightly constrained and occasionally open to chance seems to be the best solution for Richter in his attempt to erase his own trace: “The paintings should be there to show themselves, not to show me.”

Reflections and Reality

Gerhard Richter has long been interested in reflections and the fundamental ambiguity between reality and representation. For him, the mirror serves as a powerful metaphor for human perception: we believe we see reality in it, but what it shows us are merely fragments of the world and ever-changing appearances. The mirror thus represents, in his eyes, an ideal form of art — immediate, neutral, and inherently multiple. In turn, he famously stated: “Every painting is a mirror.”

Here are two sculptures made of colored glass panels featured in the exhibition. One is titled Brown and Blue, the other Red and Green. The panels of each diptych are positioned at a right angle, adding another layer of ambiguity as they reflect each other.

The choice of these color pairs is certainly not accidental. Deeply rooted in color theory, the brown/blue pairing suggests the opposition between warm and cold. As for red/green, it is the most classic example of “complementary” colors (see here).

These transparent or colored glass sculptures appear in several rooms of the Foundation. Are they a constant reminder of the artist’s preoccupations? Or a way for him to include us in his pictorial space so that we may appropriate it more fully?

Reflections and superimpositions are not limited to the sculptures; they also appear in his paintings. Particularly intriguing in this regard is the series of portraits Richter dedicated to Gilbert & George, a couple of artists and friends of the painter. They form a very particular kind of “double.” Since meeting, they have built their artistic identity around the idea that they are no longer two distinct artists, but one single artist composed of two people. Richter captured this duality perfectly by playing with superimpositions and reflections.

Architecture and Landscape

Richter is just as comfortable painting architecture as he is painting landscape.

In Besetztes Haus (1989), the two genres enter into dialogue: the façade of a squatted house occupies only the left half of the composition, while the right half opens onto trees bathed in an almost magical pink-orange light. What could have been a raw, sociological image becomes a enigmatic scene in which architecture and nature coexist in a strange harmony between order and chaos.

This permeability between the built and the natural reappears in his aerial views of cities or urban ensembles, which sometimes imperceptibly slide toward abstraction.

The two landscapes below further illustrate this oscillation between abstraction and figuration. Observe how different the pictorial techniques are.

In Parkstück (1971), composed of three panels each measuring 300 × 125 cm, the painting is gestural, almost wild. Broad brushstrokes define the ground in large bands, dark in the foreground and lighter in the middle. Parkstück offers a synthetic vision, with a limited but effective palette in which the pink of the foliage responds to the tender green of the wild grasses. One is not far from abstraction.

Meadowland (1985), on the other hand, belongs to his more realistic photo-paintings. More modest in size (though still nearly one square meter), it gives off a more contemplative, even melancholic atmosphere. The rendering is soft, slightly hazy at the horizon, without being as blurred as the photo-paintings of the 1960s. The sky occupies a predominant place, and yet almost nothing happens in it. No dramatic clouds, no expressive contrasts. On the contrary, it seems to emanate a diffuse, captivating light.

Light and Matter

The light in the seascape below recalls that of Meadowland (1985). Here, all points of reference have disappeared, leaving us facing immensity rendered through perfectly smooth paint. In another seascape, by contrast, we encounter a heavy sky and a sea treated as raw matter.

Richter is undeniably a master of light, a distant heir to the German Romantic tradition embodied by Caspar David Friedrich. He captures subtle atmospheric effects with great dexterity. One could almost feel the cold looking at Davos (1981) where the almost unreal light seems to dissolve the forms of the mountain landscape.

Past and present

Gerhard Richter’s work is nourished by an ongoing dialogue with time: the time of the Old Masters, that of his contemporaries, that of the recent past, and that of the darkest chapters of German history.

Dialogue with the great masters

In the section Constraint and Chance, I already referred to Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece as a source of inspiration. In fact, Richter is deeply shaped by the history of art, without ever falling into mere copying or pastiche.

Among the most explicit expressions of this legacy is the series Annunciation after Titian (1973), of which the five versions are presented. Faithful to his practice, Richter first developed a two-metre-long painting from a reproduction, a postcard brought back from Venice. Initially painted only for himself, and dissatisfied with the result, he made five variations, with different degrees of abstraction.

My favorite is certainly version 344-2, for its energetic gesture, the partial dissolution of the forms, and above all the sense of movement in the appearance of the angel. Here below, the version 343-4, the last and the most abstract of the series.

Moreover, Richter maintains a constant dialogue with several great masters. Already mentioned above in the section on landscapes, Caspar David Friedrich occupies a particularly important place. One could also find echoes of Vermeer in the silent intimacy of certain portraits, and of the Flemish and Spanish vanitas tradition in his candles and skulls, which are also present in the exhibition.

Dialogue with contemporary artists

Richter is equally engaged in a sustained dialogue with his contemporaries and with the immediately preceding generation. A friend of Gilbert & George, he shares with them a reflection on the double. Faced with Marcel Duchamp, who had proclaimed the death of painting, Richter responds forcefully: his famous Nude Descending a Staircase (1966) directly alludes to Duchamp’s painting. It constitutes an ironic and paradoxical affirmation of painting’s vitality.

At the same time, he finds in the composer John Cage a true source of inspiration. The acceptance of chance, silence, and indeterminacy represents for him a liberating way of thinking, one that profoundly influences his abstract work and his conception of the artwork as an open process.

The recent past

Richter does not hesitate to confront traumatic historical events. With the series October 18, 1977 (1988), he approaches the drama of the Red Army Faction (RAF) from a distance: the archival photographs are blurred, faded, almost illegible, as if collective memory itself were clouded. Regarding these paintings, he wrote in his Notes in 1988: “[…] they are the expression of a deep and mute emotion, an almost desperate attempt to give form to feelings of compassion, pain, and horror […]”

Later, he responded to the September 11, 2001 attacks with September (2005). The event became pure abstraction. And yet the painting remains clearly identifiable, both as a tragedy and as representative of Richter’s style.

In any case, Richter refuses sensationalism, reminding us of the impossibility of fully grasping reality while affirming the necessity of not forgetting.

The shameful past

In the face of the Shoah, Richter adopts a particularly painful position. In 2014, he created a series of large abstract paintings based on photographs of the Birkenau camps taken by the Sonderkommandos. After numerous attempts, he abandoned all realistic figuration, judging that no image can truly “show” horror.

These monumental, dark, striated abstractions become paradoxical sites of memory: they conceal and reveal at the same time, refusing to turn suffering into spectacle while preventing oblivion. This is undoubtedly one of Richter’s most radical and respectful confrontations with the darkest past of Germany.

Analog and digital

Richter began his photo-paintings in the era of analog photography. In painting, he gave us all its aspects, including artifacts such as the unsightly shadows created by flashes. These are the traces of an era. High-sensitivity film was not yet available, and only professional flashes, sometimes aimed at the ceiling, provided diffuse light.

Through Strich (auf Blau) [Line (on Blue), 1979], he explores how the gesture of a line is altered by the photographic enlargement process. The original is a painted line on cardboard measuring 3.3 x 47.5 cm. Richter turns it into a work 1.90 m high and 20 meters long. At that scale, the line seems to have been made with a broad brush, but this is an illusion: in reality, the seemingly rough texture was produced with small brushes. In the detail below (on the right), you may think you are seeing a poor focus in the photograph; in fact, that is not the case. Richter did not create a deliberate blur — he simply copied the blur produced by the analog enlargement process.

Apart from the Strip series, Gerhard Richter explored digital imagery very little. It is a pity; I would have loved for him to immortalize in paint the horrible artifacts of JPEG compression, itself a witness to the beginnings of digital image-making. But, as a worthy heir to Richter, the artist Enda O’Donoghue has done so.

Conclusion

At the end of this retrospective, one impression dominates: that of an artist who spent his life exploring major pairs of opposites — figuration and abstraction, sharpness and blur, systematic and random, reality and reflection, constraint and chance. Richter never stopped moving through these tensions without ever settling in one camp.

I see this less as a strategy for obscuring the issue than as a profound distrust of any form of certainty. He refuses to take sides and affirms, through his work itself, that reality is too complex to be enclosed within a single image.

An absolute technical master, he painted everything, explored everything. His work opened paths that many contemporary artists are now following. We leave this retrospective with a blurred image of the man, but with the certainty of having encountered one of the greatest image-makers of our time.

And that is probably what he wants, he who once declared: “I have no program, no style, no direction. I like the undefined, the boundless, the continual uncertainty.”

Sources

Gerhard Richter, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Le Journal no. 20, 2025.
Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Ed. Hazan, 2010.
Arte documentary: Ema dans l’escalier.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Grok (developed by xAI) for the quality of its answers and for the many exchanges that enriched the documentation for this article. Thanks also to Perplexity for help with the English translation. Finally, thanks to the Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden for permission to publish my photographs taken at the exhibition.