PRESENTATION: Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter is considered among the most influential living artists. Richter’s experiments with abstraction and photo-based painting greatly contributed to the history of the medium. Culling from his vast image archive known as the Atlas, Richter’s paintings reference images of his daughter Betty, flickering candles, aerial photographs, portraits of criminals, and pastoral landscapes. “Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form,” he reflected. “And the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context.”

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

The exhibition of paintings, drawings, and glass installations by Gerhard Richter at David Zwirner Gallery’s Paris location coincides with a major retrospective of the artist’s work—curated by Nicholas Serota and Dieter Schwarz—at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Together, these two presentations offer a rare and multifaceted view into the practice of one of the most influential and persistently innovative artists of our time. Spanning a remarkable range of scope, scale, and technique, the works on view at David Zwirner underscore Richter’s expansive understanding of the painted medium and his relentless curiosity about the nature of representation and perception. His celebrated “Fotobilder” series—such as “Blumen” (1992), “Torso” (1997), and “Kl. Badende” (1994)—transforms personal and found photographs into painterly meditations on memory, surface, and the instability of the image. Through blurring, smudging, or obscuring, Richter dissolves the boundaries between painting and photography, creating works that function as conceptual experiments in translation—where one medium continually redefines and interrogates the other. In his “Abstrakte Bilder” (Abstract Paintings), Richter approaches the possibilities of abstraction from a distinctly different vantage point. Carefully layered and formally intricate, these compositions embody a tension between accident and control. The pair of “Abstract Paintings” from 2001—animated by intersecting swaths of pink, green, and golden yellow—invite the viewer into a chromatic field of both exuberance and restraint. Their expansive planes of color contrast with Richter’s later oil paintings from 2015 to 2017, whose densely overlaid markings form complex, almost topographical surfaces. The dialogue continues in the inclusion of a monumental four-meter-wide “Strip” painting from 2024. Digitally generated from the *Abstract Paintings*, the “Strips” extend Richter’s long-standing interrogation of the painted image into the digital realm, orchestrating a conversation between painting, photography, print, and abstraction itself. Also on view are a selection of recent drawings, including new works alongside those first presented in “Gerhard Richter: 81 Drawings, 1 Strip Painting, 1 Edition” at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich earlier this year. Throughout his career, Richter has treated drawing as both an intimate and essential counterpart to his painting. Using colored ink, graphite, and other materials, he explores the immediacy of line and gesture—revealing another dimension of his sustained inquiry into how an image comes into being and how meaning accrues through the artist’s hand. Completing the exhibition are three wall-mounted glass installations of varying dimensions and “3 Scheiben” (2023), composed of three upright transparent panes held within a metal frame. Since his landmark “4 Glasscheiben” of 1967, Richter has engaged glass as both subject and medium, positioning it as a literal and conceptual reflection on painting rather than as pure sculpture. The act of viewing these works becomes a perceptual event: reality is mirrored, fragmented, and reconstituted, oscillating between visibility and opacity. As Janice Bretz and Kerstin Küster observe, in Richter’s glass pieces “visitors are not spectators but creators,” confronted with “the difference between the real exhibition space and the random reflection of reality in the glass.… It is an invitation from the artist to think about seeing and what is seen as one potential reality among many. Seeing is situational, and reality always depends on the viewer.” Through this Paris exhibition, Richter’s work once again affirms its power to question not only what we see, but how we see—foregrounding the act of perception as both subject and medium in its own right.

Photo: Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2016, Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches (60 x 60 cm), Signed, dated, and numbered verso, © Gerhard Richter, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, France, Duration: 20/10-20/1282025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com/