【Book Description】
For more than six decades, Gerhard Richter has remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. His practice moves between figuration and abstraction, painting and photography, history and memory. While continually expanding the possibilities of medium and form, he has also persistently questioned the truth of images and the role painting can still play in the contemporary world. Gerhard Richter is the official exhibition catalogue accompanying the major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, offering a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career and tracing the evolution of his visual language and artistic thought.
Produced in close collaboration with the artist, the book accompanies the large-scale retrospective held in Paris from 2025 to 2026. Presented at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, housed in Frank Gehry’s iconic building, the exhibition follows a chronological structure and brings together key works from every stage of Richter’s career. This approach allows readers to see how he has continually challenged the possibilities of painting while developing a distinctive artistic language shaped by both continuity and transformation.
The volume features a rich selection of finely reproduced color images, encompassing paintings, drawings, overpainted photographs, and sculptures. From his early photo-based figurative works and series exploring German history and personal memory to his celebrated large-scale abstractions, the book reveals Richter’s sustained engagement with images, color, chance, and artistic process. Three large foldout sections further highlight the scale and detail of selected works, allowing readers to experience the depth, texture, and visual intensity of his paintings more fully.
Trained in Dresden, Richter has described himself as a “classical painter,” yet his work consistently reinterprets traditional genres such as portraiture, landscape, still life, and history painting through a contemporary lens. Beneath their often restrained and contemplative surfaces, his works engage deeply with history, politics, memory, and ethics. His abstract paintings, meanwhile, are built through repeated layers of paint, scraping, removal, and accumulation, revealing both chance and physicality within the creative process and resulting in a visual language of remarkable force.
Gerhard Richter is not only an important record of the artist’s career, but also an essential publication for understanding the development of contemporary art. For collectors, curators, museum professionals, and readers interested in contemporary painting, art history, and visual culture, this volume serves both as a valuable exhibition document and as an authoritative introduction to Richter’s artistic world.
【Details】
Author: Dieter Schwarz (Author), Nicholas Serota (Author)
Publisher: Citadelles & Mazenod
Publication Year: 2026
Dimensions: 30 × 24 cm
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 416 pages
