SILS MARIA.- The Luma Foundation presents STRIP TOWER (962), 2023, a large-scale outdoor sculpture by Gerhard Richter at Lake Silvaplana in Sils Maria, Engadin. On view from 27 January 2026 for an initial period of three years, the work forms part of Elevation 1049, extending the project into the Alpine landscape.
Based on Richter’s Strip Paintings (from 2010), STRIP TOWER (962) translates his exploration of painting, photography, digital processes, and abstraction into three dimensions. Eight interlocking panels clad in brightly striped ceramic tiles rise over five metres, forming a cross-shaped interior that visitors can enter. Immersed in shifting fields of colour and light, they encounter a work that engages perception and materiality while entering into dialogue with the Alpine landscape of Sils Maria—a place Richter has visited regularly since 1989.
Maja Hoffmann, Founder and President of the Luma Foundation, says: "Gerhard Richter’s practice has shaped the intellectual landscape of contemporary art for more than six decades, and STRIP TOWER (962) represents a rare synthesis of conceptual rigour, formal clarity, and material precision. I want to thank Gerhard Richter and the Richter Foundation for generously lending this remarkable work to the Luma Foundation.
Installed in the Engadin, the work responds to light, climate, and scale without imposing itself on the landscape. Its presence affirms the Alps as a site of serious cultural production, where artistic experimentation can unfold with depth and responsibility. This installation reflects Luma Foundation’s long-term commitment to situating significant artistic voices in contexts that encourage sustained reflection, public engagement, and a forward-looking understanding of the Alpine territory."
Gerhard Richter says: “I am very much looking forward to our collaboration. Sils Maria is particularly dear to me, and I can think of no more fitting location for this project.”
The work STRIP TOWER (962) by Gerhard Richter is presented as part of Elevation 1049, a project conceived and produced by the Luma Foundation since 2014.
Remaining true to its biennial vision, Elevation 1049 will return to Gstaad and the Saanenland in early 2027, curated by Mohamed Almusibli, Director of Kunsthalle Basel. Further details will be announced in due course.
In his multi-layered oeuvre, Gerhard Richter deals with fundamental questions of painting. He was born in Dresden on 9 February 1932 and grew up in Bogatynia and Waltersdorf near Zittau, where he later worked as an advertising painter as well as a stage and sign painter before he was accepted by the Dresden Art Academy in 1951, where he studied mural painting until 1956. In 1953, he visited the first documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany.
Having fled to the Federal Republic of Germany in February 1961, Richter studied painting until 1965 at the Düsseldorf State Academy of Art, where he taught as a professor from 1971. In 1972, he was the first artist to present a solo exhibition in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He also participated in Documenta 5 (and later in Documentas 10 and 12) in Kassel. Richter’s many international solo exhibitions have included Tate, London, (1991,2011), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, (1986, 2012), and MoMA, New York, (2002), The Met Breuer, New York (2020); The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2022) and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2025).
Among the numerous honours he has received in his career are the Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale and the Praemium Imperiale Prize, Tokyo, both awarded in 1997. In 2006 the Gerhard Richter Archive at the Dresden State Art Collections was founded.
Gerhard Richter lives and works in Cologne.
