As every year, during Art Basel, the Swiss city turns itself into a hub of contemporary art, attracting collectors, art players and lovers from all over the world; but the secret of this success is not just due to the international fair, though it is undoubtedly one of the well-known and most visited. What makes it “a place to go” is also the list of outstanding art institutions offering high-level program of talks and exhibitions accompanying the event, which become memorable experiences. Soon after reaching Basel, our first stop is Fondation Beyeler, the perfect building designed by Renzo Piano that, as usually, pays tribute to a giant of art: this is the turn of Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden, Germany), one of the most important artists of our time. Following on from Panorama – the huge retrospective, which celebrated the artist’s 80th birthday at Tate Modern in London, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2011-12 –, the Foundation hosts an exhibition entitled Pictures/Series, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, that puts together, for the first time, Richter’s works conceived as series and cycles.

Floodlit by the natural light coming from the ceiling and the huge walls/windows, the show presented a stimulating selection that encompasses the artist’s career over the last sixty years, displaying figurative works, including portraits, land and seascapes, abstract paintings, Greys and Color charts, photographs and digital prints. After the wall-size color chart entitled 1024 Colors (1973) that greets the visitors in the foyer along with two graceful small flowers paintings, the exhibition path goes on with the eight-part S. and Child (1995), which recalls the Virgin and Child theme through the representation of real portraits, but depicted with different stylistic approach and levels of abstraction. From the monumental and controlled pictures of Strip (2013) to the as much large-scale canvases of Cage (2006) – layered surfaces, scratched and erased while listening to the American composer, John Cage –, passing through the Abstract Painting, Rhombus (1998) and the Gray (1975) monochromes, there is space for individual works such as the poetic and emotional Seascape (1975) and Iceberg in Mist (1982) – Greenland landscapes shrouded in mist and mystery –, the delicate and iconic Ella (2007), Small Bather and Reader (both 1994), Betty (1988) and Torso (1997).

The Annunciation after Titian (1973) and the cycle October 18, 1977 (1988) merit a special attention. The former offers the rare opportunity to see all together the five paintings inspired by the old master, catching Richter’s personal process of abstraction and continuous variation; while the latter, consisting of 15 blurred and dark paintings that reproduce press images of the members of the German terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF), presents a historical and controversial issue from a human and pensive way. “Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.” The unmissable exhibition will run until September 7th, 2014 at Fondation Beyeler.

Panorama is much more than an exhibition. It is the first chronological and comprehensive retrospective arranged, thanks to the collaboration between three of the main European art institutions, to retrace Gerhard Richter‘s entire career and celebrate his 80th birthday.

After Tate Modern in London and Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the traveling show covering fifty years of Richter’s oeuvre – accompanied by an unmissable book with essays and interviews of international critics and curators -, is now on view at Centre Pompidou in Paris and will run until the 24th September.

The versatile artist, born in Dresden in the former East Germany in 1932 and moved to the West during the 60′s, is widely regarded as one of the most important painters at work today. Well known for his ability to reinvent and transform his art, Richter has worked with traditional and new media. With sculptures, drawings, photographs and by painting over photographs, he is still – and unconventionally – remaining loyal to painting as a timeless way of expression: «painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human».

Many previous exhibitions have been devoted to the German Master until today with the aim of plumbing the depths of his work and focusing on different aspects of his research, but, as stated by the title in itself, this show wants to go beyond. Including the so-called Photo-paintings, figurative and abstract works, land and seascapes, glass sculptures and mirror works, drawings and photographs, portraits, Greys and Colour Charths, Panorama encompasses the whole archive of Richter’s achievements.

Gerhard Richter’s retrospective helps to underline his artistic transitions: producing paintings through the use of an episcope on the basis of his own photographs, erasing figurative paintings by covering them with a layer of gray paint or using painting as a way of inheriting a tradition and revealing his own intimacy and historical experiences. From the 60’s to today the artist has been placed in the camps of minimalism, conceptual and political art, passing through the emergence of abstraction, always following his idea of letting a thing come, rather than creating it.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Centre Pompidou is curated by Alfred Pacquement, Camille Morineau and Lucia Pesatane, with colleagues in London (Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey from Tate) and Berlin (Udo Kittelmann and Dorothee Brill at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)