The details
at a glance

Exhibition
Gerhard Richter
Exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton
October 17, 2025, to March 2, 2026

Opening Hours
Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday: 11.00 – 20.00 h
Friday: 11.00 – 21.00 h
Saturday and Sunday: 10:.00 – 20.00 h
Tuesday: Closed

Prices
EUR 16 for adults (without shuttle)
EUR 10 for students under 26
EUR 5 for children under 18, artists
Free admission for children under 4, people with disabilities, and one accompanying adult
EUR 2 extra for the shuttle bus
-> Unfortunately, our tickets are more expensive… However, by purchasing them from us, you would support the work on this site! We would be delighted and thank you very much! 🙏

Audio guide:
FLV app with free information about the exhibition. (FRZ/EN)

ICOM-Card:
Free admission for ICOM members. Ticket on the official Website.

All rooms of the Fondation Louis Vuitton will be dedicated to the Gerhard Richter exhibition. The retrospective will feature 270 works from 1962 to 2024 – including oil paintings, steel and glass sculptures, pencil and pen drawings, watercolors, and overpainted photographs. For the first time, an exhibition will present a complete overview of sixty years of his creative career.

What is special about his work is that Richter never painted directly from nature or from the subject matter. Everything is filtered through another medium – such as a photograph or a drawing – from which he develops an independent image. Over the years, he explored the genres and techniques of painting and developed various ways of applying paint to canvas: with a brush, palette knife, or squeegee.

The exhibition brings together numerous major works by Richter up until his decision in 2017 to abandon painting and concentrate solely on drawing. Each section of the exhibition is chronologically dedicated to a decade and shows the development of a distinctive painterly vision between breaks and continuities – from the first paintings based on photographs to the final abstractions.

Gallery 1: 1962–1970 – Paintings from Photographs.
Gallery 2: 1971–1975 – Questioning Representation.
Gallery 4: 1976–1986 – Exploring Abstraction.
Gallery 5: 1987–1995 – The Dark Decade.
Galleries 7 and 8: 1996–2009 – New Perspectives on Painting: Chance.
Galleries 9 and 10: 2009–2023 – Last Paintings.

Many of Richter’s works serve as witnesses to (German) history. Take his “48 Portraits” (1971 +72), for instance, where he depicted 48 well-known figures – scientists, artists, writers, philosophers – not a single woman is among them. Back in the early 1970s, when he created these works, no one seemed particularly bothered; today, that would certainly be different. Even in the 1990s, the series caught the attention of the well-known German feminist Alice Schwarzer, who criticised it in a radio interview. In response, Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein created his own cycle of 48 portraits of notable women in 1991. Unlike Richter’s cool greys, Helnwein chose warm shades of red. The two series were first shown side by side in an exhibition in Prague in 2011.

Equally powerful is Richter’s cycle “October 18, 1977”, which deals with the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists. Though he once again employed his signature blurriness, the presence of death is almost physically palpable.

Abstraction as a Language of Freedom

In the later galleries, Richter’s abstract works take centre stage – vast compositions of colour that shift between chaos and harmony. He often referred to these paintings as “free painting”, an act of liberation from any narrative constraint. Yet even within abstraction, a trace of reality lingers, as if each canvas holds a hidden memory. Curators Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota have masterfully captured this tension, drawing visitors into a constant play between closeness and distance, recognition and uncertainty.

An Artist Redefining Art

Richter, now regarded as one of the most influential living artists, has once again demonstrated with this retrospective why his work remains so timeless. The exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton is not only a tribute to a master of painting but also an invitation to rethink art itself. In a world overwhelmed by images, Richter reminds us that painting is always a matter of seeing – and of not seeing.