“Richter remains one of the greatest living artists because of his devotion to the complexity of images”—Emily LaBarge
October 17, 2025
Looking at the Unseeable with Gerhard Richter By Emily LaBarge
What does it mean for an artist to declare, as Gerhard Richter did in 2017, that their painterly output is “complete?” It means we can identify a beginning and an end, with an implied trajectory in between, supported by the fact that Richter subsequently numbered his catalog of paintings from 1 to 952.
This is how a vast retrospective that just opened at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris unfolds, with 275 pieces — spanning sculpture, drawings and paintings — across 34 rooms. The exhibition covers six decades of work by the artist who was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, where he lived under fascism and then communism before fleeing to study art in the West, in Düsseldorf. Today, the artist’s practice is devoted to drawing, but it is his work as a painter that remains unparalleled. Read more. Learn more about Gerhard Richter.
