After the catastrophe of the Shoah and World War II, Gerhard Richter invented a new visual language for the unspeakable.

He has been called a chameleon of German art. Indeed, the versatility of Gerhard Richter, who was born in Dresden in 1932 and has lived in the Rhineland since 1961, is now on display in Paris. This versatility has defied linear development, resulting in both temporary pauses and striking new beginnings.

The retrospective, curated by Dieter Schwarz and Sir Nicholas Serota of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, clearly illustrates the various phases and leaps in the artist's work. It also highlights the constants throughout the artist's more than six decades of activity.

Since the exhibitions that the Centre Pompidou mounted for him in 1977 and the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1993, Richter is no longer a stranger in the French capital. While older visitors who saw the exhibitions back then are now flocking to the museums, the audience is surprisingly young, as if they are attending an event that liberates them from half-truths.

The exhibition hall in the Bois de Boulogne, renowned for its architecture alone, presents a comprehensive selection of 275 works spanning the years 1962 to 2024. It offers the largest Richter retrospective ever shown and serves as a résumé, as the artist ceased painting in 2017. On display are numerous paintings, but also drawings and watercolors, overpainted photographs, and individual sculptures, including works in steel and glass.

The exhibition, which proceeds primarily chronologically, opens with "Table" (1962) – declared number 1 in the catalogue raisonné despite earlier works – as well as paintings from the years when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and students took to the streets. These are works that Richter created long after beginning his studies at the Dresden Academy (1951), his pivotal experience at Documenta II in Kassel (1959), and his escape from East Germany (1961).

Thematically, however, they are related to his origins: paintings that take up and reproduce photographs from the family album or illustrated magazines. However, the artist distorts these undeniably high-quality source material by blurring and overpainting them, thus softening their sharpness.

It was during this time that he also created his first landscape paintings. A hallmark of Richter's work is his use of a filter. He doesn't work from nature or a model, but rather from their representations, which he repeats, interpretively modifying them in the process to create autonomous images. His tools include brushes of varying sizes and widths, palette knives, and later, even planks, which he uses to scrape and scratch to reveal what is hidden.

Richter initially used exclusively black, white, and gray in all its shades, until gray alone became monochromatic. Color was the exception and, at best, appeared highly restrained. While he continued to be interested in blurring and overpainting, his first explorations of optical illusions came into play, as demonstrated by works such as "Window" and "Gray Streaks."

Even the image of a blurred "deer" in the forest, surrounded by clearly defined lines representing branches and twigs, already contains in its germinal form the expression of the problems and stimuli inherent in painting that preoccupied Richter not only until 1970, but also later and across all supposed interludes. He ceaselessly turned to new motifs, but above all to new technical and formal challenges.

Gerhard Richter: «Gudrun», 1987; «Candle», 1982.

In the early 1970s, his painting became more gestural and colorful. For example, in "Parkstück" (Park Piece), he used brushes and unexpectedly mixed olive green and burgundy into gray. His motifs were drawn from things he had seen and photographed during his travels—for instance, at Lake Lucerne, in Greenland, or in Venice—often with a time lag, as he frequently only considered them in retrospect. While he did visit the Biennale in Venice, he primarily discovered a painting by Titian called "Annunciation." This painting became the subject of a process of alienation, in which color detaches itself from the subject, dissolving it and taking on a life of its own.

The years 1976 to 1986 mark a departure towards a completely new colorism for him, as yellow and pink joined gray, green, and red in his palette. The previously subdued, matte tones even gave way to vibrant neon colors. At the same time, he exposed layers of superimposed paint, creating a dialogue between substrates and surfaces. Alongside his decidedly experimental work, he continued his work as a landscape painter and still-life artist.

In both genres, his work appears almost classical. Motifs include a burning candle or a "bottle with apple" (1989). Having long adhered to a representational style, albeit an abstracting one, or moving on the cusp between figuration and abstraction, he now begins with paintings that are nothing more than constellations and conglomerates of pigments.

Because the structure of the Fondation Louis Vuitton's exhibition layout alternates between abstract and representational works, the show offers a rollercoaster of contrasts: austere and serious, sometimes even joyless passages, and those that appear more accessible, occasionally even pleasing. The artist's widely evolving aesthetic, however, remains a defining characteristic in a truly unmistakable way.

Gerhard Richter: «Ema (Nude on a Staircase)», 1966; «Self-Portrait», 1996.

The exhibition features works that have become iconic over the years: alongside "Nude on a Staircase," the series "48 Portraits," based on photographs of famous scientists, writers, and musicians such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Giacomo Puccini, is on display. Among the more than one hundred lenders is the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which loaned the series "October 18, 1977" to Paris. This series is based on photographs of the bodies of Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Gudrun Ensslin—members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) around Ulrike Meinhof—who were found dead in their cells.

Similar to the distortion of photographs of bombers who reduced his birthplace to rubble, contemporary history and current events in press coverage provide food for thought, revolving around personal and collective traumas, their repression or processing, and identity.

For Richter, shifts in phase are influenced by both artistic and biographical factors. His return to a basic geometric form, the sphere, serves as a starting point for his search for reorientation, as do private events. His wives, Marianne (called Ema), Isa, and Sabine, as well as his children, inspire scenes of intimacy.

The engagement with optical illusions or color fields is less explicit; fleeting effects disappear before they reappear in a modified form. Thus, the found and then reproduced color chart, a sample sheet from manufacturers, becomes, after intermediate steps, a composition assembled by a random number generator, albeit post-processed, ultimately a process.

Gerhard Richter's four large panels on «Birkenau» provide the final chord to the Paris exhibition.

He uses the same approach for what is probably his most prominent work, the tall window on the south transept facade of Cologne Cathedral. However, it earns him not only praise but also accusations of unimaginativeness. A similar reaction is directed at the result of a commissioned work for the Reichstag in Berlin; Richter combines black with red and gold in an obvious yet surprising way.

Some works may reveal dead ends or temporary lack of inspiration, as is also the case in other artists' biographies. However, much of the work is compelling, including pieces composed of the finest multicolored stripes and the ensemble titled "Silicate."

The four large panels of "Birkenau" provide the final chord to his painting oeuvre and the exhibition. For these works, Richter, in 2014, referenced four historical photographs secretly taken on the grounds of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He transformed these images, documenting immeasurable horror, into entirely abstract compositions. The unspeakable becomes the unspeakable.

«Gerhard Richter», Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, until March 2. Catalogue: 49.95 euros.