A major retrospective exhibition currently on display in Paris showcases more than fifty years of work by Gerhard Richter, widely considered the most important living painter of the 20th century. The comprehensive show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton traces the German artist's career from 1962 to 2024, revealing how his unique approach of combining figurative and abstract painting emerged from a life shaped by historical trauma and doubt.
Why paint when you're born in the 20th century, arriving just after the modern giants from Manet to Picasso? Isn't everything futile? For Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, painting was truly an obvious choice. This unprecedented retrospective of the artist invites viewers to discover the challenges Richter set for himself during his sixty-year career, guided by one intuition: to paint everything, even the unspeakable.
The foundations of Richter's painting rest primarily on the traumas of history. The artist grew up in Nazi Germany, where at age 10, like all children his age, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. Some members of his family were victims of Nazism, while others were forced to endure the regime. His aunt Marianne, who suffered from psychiatric disorders, was sterilized and then murdered by the Nazis as part of their euthanasia campaign against the mentally ill. His uncle Rudi died at the front while serving in the Wehrmacht. His father, banished from society after the war, committed suicide in 1968.
Throughout his life, Richter has interrogated the history of the 20th century, its memory, its perpetrators and victims, constantly questioning how to represent the unspeakable. This interrogation reaches its climax at the end of the retrospective with his cycle of four paintings titled "Birkenau" (2014), shown for the first time in France. These works represent the culmination of an oeuvre haunted by historical traumas.
Once again, Richter erased the figurative images that inspired him - horrifying photographs taken clandestinely by deportees in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He first copied these images and then covered them with abstract paint, driven by what he described as "shame, pity, or religious feeling." The abstraction creates a form of obstruction of the original images, and this interaction between representation and erasure produces a particular kind of memory.
Enormous ash-colored glass panels face these four canvases and reflect the image of the room. Through this play of mirrors, the viewer becomes enrolled in this installation. Should we see or not see? Should we reveal or conceal absolute evil? In this admittedly chilling atmosphere, Richter manages to express the impossible, the unspeakable, demonstrating how art can confront the darkest chapters of human history while maintaining the power to move and transform viewers.
