Blurred lines

A thrilling show in Paris, boasting 270 works, reveals the German artist Gerhard Richter in all his contradictory brilliance, from bold brush strokes to shades of grey

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Gerhard Richter recalls, as a child, drawing with his finger on his empty, slightly greasy dinner plate, tracing and retracing fanciful curves and spatial structures in endless alterations on the china.

Decades later, he would place blobs of different colours on a canvas then intermingle them using slithery curving brushstrokes, lubricated by the oil and paint, until the entire surface was covered. More or less pure colour slid among the passages of impure, much-mixed pigment. Other paintings were made using large squeegees and spatulas, pushing and dragging paint over the surface, and just as often scraping it off again. The squeegee would often pick up previously applied, sometimes half-dried paint, excavating previous layers even as it applied new ones. Smearing paint on, dragging it off again, Richter would keep working until he could no longer think of anything else to do to a painting. One day in 2017, he stopped painting entirely. Since then, he has devoted himself mostly to drawing.

Richter's art is filled with beginnings and endings, revelling in chance as often as he has used craftsmanship and exactitude to paint people and places and things, from flowers wilting in a vase to street corners, elegiac landscapes and the dead. Standing amid his retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, it strikes me that however one chooses to describe or compartmentalise the different strands of his work, his art remains irreducible. It's contrarian, fickle, controlled yet intemperate, the contradictions make a mockery of fixed readings. His art is filled with fugues, with self-absorption and an objective stare.