Gerhard Richter and the Question of Artistic Identity

Image : Strip (921-2) by Gerhard Richter

In February, I visited the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris to see a major presentation of work by Gerhard Richter.

What becomes immediately apparent in encountering Richter's work at scale is that it resists the idea of a stable artistic identity. There is no single "Richter style" in the conventional sense. Instead, there are multiple systems operating in parallel: image-based painting, abstraction, mechanical chance processes, overpainting, glass works, and intermittent returns to figuration.

Any attempt to read the work as a linear progression - from figuration to abstraction - collapses quickly.

Image : Tisch by Gerhard Richter 1962

Richter and the Refusal of Fixed Position

Richter has often described painting in terms that resist certainty. Across interviews and catalogue texts, he repeatedly frames painting as something that cannot be fully planned in advance, where the outcome remains partially unknown, and where doubt is not an interruption but a working condition.

In this sense, painting is not a system of answers, but of continuous testing.

Image : Ruhrtalbrücke by Gerhard Richter 1969

Image : Abstraktes Bild series by Gerhard Richter 1986

From early photo-based figurative paintings, to works that destabilise the image through blur and erasure, to systematic and chance-based abstraction such as the squeegee paintings, the exhibition reads less like a linear progression and more like a sustained investigation operating across parallel languages.

What is crucial is that figuration never fully disappears. Portraits, landscapes, and still life reappear throughout the practice, not as returns to a former style, but as one of several ongoing methods.

What holds the work together is not stylistic coherence, but a sustained refusal to settle.

A Broader Art-Historical Pattern: Identity as Constraint

Seen in this context, Richter sits within a longer tradition of artists whose work both produces and destabilises recognisable identity.

For example:

• Claude Monet is often reduced to Impressionism, despite radical shifts in structure, serial logic, and perceptual focus across his late work, particularly the Water Lilies, where image edges begin to dissolve into near abstraction.
• Piet Mondrian is culturally fixed as grids and primary colours, despite an earlier body of expressive landscape painting and a gradual, exploratory movement toward abstraction rather than a sudden stylistic break.
• Pablo Picasso is often stabilised around Cubism, despite a practice defined precisely by continual rupture and reinvention across radically different visual languages.

Across these cases, "style" is less a truth of practice than a retrospective simplification - something imposed after the fact by institutions, markets, and cultural memory.

The lived production of these artists is often significantly more unstable than the identity later assigned to them.

Richter makes this instability explicit rather than incidental.

The Exhibition as Structured Misunderstanding

At the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Richter's work is necessarily organised into a legible sequence. Early figurative works lead into abstraction. Systems follow image. Processes follow representation.

But this ordering is curatorial, not conceptual.

In reality, Richter's practice is non-linear and recursive. Methods are abandoned and reintroduced. Systems appear, disappear, and reappear. Figuration and abstraction operate not as opposites in time, but as parallel tools for addressing different problems of seeing.

What holds the work together is not consistency of appearance, but continuity of inquiry.

My Own Position: Multiple Languages, Unstable Identity

What made this particularly resonant for me is that it mirrors a tension within my own practice.

Across different periods, I have worked in distinct visual and material languages:

• figurative oil painting
• abstract painting using palette knife and gestural surface construction
• and an ongoing photographic practice that is increasingly conceptual and abstract

Each of these modes has, at different times, felt like a primary direction. Yet none has resolved into a single, stable identity.

Alongside this, there is a persistent pressure - both internal and external - toward consolidation: toward a recognisable "style," a fixed visual signature, and a coherent identity that can be easily categorised and understood.

But what becomes evident when looking at Richter - and at artists whose practices exceed singular categorisation - is that this expectation may be structurally external rather than artistically necessary.

Unexpected Correspondences

One of the more unexpected effects of encountering Richter's work in person was not purely analytical, but visual.

It surfaced a subtler and more ambiguous recognition: a sense of overlap.

Across different periods of my own practice, I can identify works that - without any direct intention or reference - begin to resonate with formal territories that also exist within Richter's broader output:

• abstract paintings structured through layered surface tension and removal,
• still life works that sit between observation and constructed image,
• nature-based images that hover between documentation and abstraction,
• and multiple exposure photographic works that destabilise singular perception.

Image : Top row by Gerhard Richter / bottom row by Michael Miller

None of these developments were consciously made in relation to Richter's practice. Prior to the exhibition, my understanding of his work was largely limited to the blurred photo-based paintings and the large-scale squeegee abstractions.

What makes this difficult to reduce is that the similarities are not simply stylistic, but structural - a shared interest in instability, fragmentation, and the limits of a single image.

This raises a more difficult question than influence:

When visual outcomes begin to overlap without direct engagement, what is actually being shared?

Influence, coincidence, or something closer to a shared set of visual and material conditions?

Image : Top row by Gerhard Richter / bottom row by Michael Miller

Convergent Practice and Shared Visual Conditions

In art historical terms, this is not an unusual problem.

Artists frequently arrive at similar formal solutions independently, not because of direct influence, but because they are operating within shared conditions:

• the dominance of photographic culture
• the fragmentation of contemporary image-making
• shared material constraints of painting and reproduction
• and recurring conceptual problems around perception, memory, and representation

In this sense, similarity does not necessarily indicate imitation. It can also indicate convergence - the emergence of parallel solutions to similar problems.

This is particularly relevant in relation to Richter, who is often discussed not as an origin point, but as one articulation of a broader post-photographic condition in painting.

From this perspective, the question of "was I copying?" becomes less useful than the question of what structural conditions produce similar visual outcomes across different practices.

Identity as Retrospective Construction

A useful way to frame this is to separate two things that are often collapsed:

• practice as lived process
• identity as retrospective classification

Most canonical artists are stabilised into identity after the fact. The complexity of their production is reduced into a readable form.

Mondrian becomes grids. Monet becomes light. Picasso becomes rupture.

Richter resists this stabilisation in real time by maintaining multiple systems simultaneously, making it difficult for any single visual language to dominate interpretation.

His practice suggests that identity is not the cause of the work, but its residue.

The Central Question

This brings the question into sharper focus:

Is a single artistic identity necessary for seriousness, coherence, or recognition?

Or is the demand for singularity itself a limitation inherited from external systems of classification rather than from artistic necessity?

Richter does not resolve this question - but his practice demonstrates that coherence can exist without stylistic uniformity.

What persists is not visual consistency, but continuity of inquiry.

Closing Reflection

Leaving the Fondation Louis Vuitton, what remained was not a clearer sense of where Richter "fits," but a reframing of what identity in painting might actually be.

Not a fixed position. Not a signature. But a set of recurring problems worked through different forms over time.

And in that sense, the question extends beyond Richter and beyond any single practice.

It becomes a question for contemporary painting more broadly: whether identity is something to be achieved and stabilised - or something that inevitably emerges and dissolves as practice remains active across time, materials, and modes of seeing.