Anne Reinert joins us to discuss the sweeping Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, which traces his six-decade career from early photo-based figurative painting through bold abstractions, glass works and over-painted photographs. Drawing on the exhibition’s thematic juxtapositions, the discussion will examine his persistent tension between representation and abstraction, history and memory, where technique becomes metaphor. By situating the exhibition’s five hundred-odd works within the context of the artist’s German-born, post-war upbringing and later refusal to paint after 2017, the conversation illuminates why Richter remains a tireless investigator of image, surface and meaning.

Richter has many works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and this retrospective will help us understand his extraordinary artistic journey better.