LUMA Arles / Overpainted Photographs

LUMA Arles, in the Parc des Ateliers, is staging an exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs, a body of work that is at once essential and strikingly radical across six decades of his career.

Snapshots covered in oil paint

By painting in oil straight onto photographic snapshots, Gerhard Richter challenges the presumed authority of photography, which is supposed to record reality reliably. The image is neither wholly revealed nor completely hidden: it turns into a “contested surface” where representation and abstraction clash.

Gesture, chance and matter set against the photograph

In these dense works, the photograph yields to gesture, chance and matter. Marks of paint cut across its descriptive function and move it from the status of proof to that of a space of ambiguity. Viewers no longer face a document but an event: the way memory, perception and meaning are built up and undone again and again.

Representation, truth and belief: Richter’s questions

The exhibition follows the central questions of Richter’s practice: the limits of representation, the instability of truth, and the ways images shape belief. It is a rare chance to see works that are understated yet radical, and to gauge how relevant they remain and how deeply they have influenced artistic debate today.

At a time when images multiply and are easily manipulated, these Overpainted Photographs stand as foundational works, in which the image becomes a “site of uncertainty, resistance and transformation”.