In Farbe getauchte Erinnerungen
The Fondation Luma in Arles, France, has opened three exhibitions exploring memory and archives, headlined by Gerhard Richter's "Overpainted Photographs." The show features 120 works from Richter's private archive, some exhibited for the first time, created since the mid-1980s by dragging photographs through leftover paint in his studio. Richter, now 94, personally selected and hung the works chronologically starting from the fall of the Berlin Wall, reflecting his lost homeland and the passage of time. The exhibition also includes early sketches and oil paintings by the late architect Zaha Hadid, previously shown at London's Serpentine Gallery in 2016.
This exhibition matters because it offers rare insight into Richter's intimate, diary-like practice of merging photography and abstraction, a process he called "controlled chance." It connects his personal history—fleeing East Germany in 1961—to broader themes of memory, loss, and German identity, including his engagement with Nazi crimes and the RAF cycle. By presenting these works alongside Hadid's early pieces, the Fondation Luma underscores how visual artists and architects alike use archives to process personal and collective histories, making the show a significant moment for understanding Richter's legacy and the role of memory in contemporary art.