File Note 113: Daniel Richter

Welcome to the swirling world of Daniel Richter! Located in the space between abstract and figurative painting, where colours, elements, and motifs are laid on top of each other, layer upon layer, where it seethes menacingly over here and flashes brightly over there, and where the titles of the paintings only seem to give information about the themes depicted within. The paintings exhibited here offer an insight into the varied and contradictory work of a painter for whom nothing is as suspicious as routine. From the 1990s until today, the works testify to the act of painting as the only method and opportunity to critically explore painting anew, again and again, to test it, to wrangle with it, to address it. How much colour, how many forms, how much chaos, how much reduction, how many references, how much wit, how much sarcasm, how much history can one picture hold? Painting against conforming to convention, painting based on challenge. Above all it is always about, and remains about, painting.

Daniel Richter’s artistic career began in Hamburg in the 1990s, when he moved from the left-wing punk and squatting scene to the solitude of the studio, where he studied under Werner Büttner and assisted Albert Oehlen. The paintings of his first creative period are a reaction to what you weren’t allowed to do back then: to fill a picture completely. Pictures emerged from his so called abstract phase such as Havanna (1997) or Europa – Immer Ärger mit den Sogenannten (1999), which fascinate due to the almost unending number of elements, forms and colours. The motto seems to be horror vacui ¹ in abundance rather than less is more. Richter calls it ‘pure materialism’. Colours in all their physical states enter in and run free: translucent, transparent, wet, opaque, rich, deep, full, one on top of the other. Richter always maintains control over the seemingly arbitrary pulsing chaos of the different elements, which follow a careful composition. Then, as now, the titles offer only a superficial way of interpreting – if they offer one at all – and not a solution to the puzzle. Taking in the opulence of this excess, admiring the variation of colours, being open to painting, and taking everything in – that is the challenge for the viewer. 

With no excess of colour or form, or depth of image space, the break from the overriding themes of multiplicity and narration is evident in Lonely Old Slogan (2006). The hopelessness of the window without a view and the virtually monochrome black wall simultaneously underline the half-life of the once rebellious slogan ‘Fuck the Police’ on the protagonist’s back. We encounter another figure from behind in A Flower in Flames (2012): he seems tiny, outfitted with a turban and machine gun before an imposing and vivid mountain landscape, calling to mind the famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich. This is not a depiction of a Romantic interrogation of the relationship between man and nature, but rather it is about pushing artistic possibility further. Through the figure of the soldier, Richter once again evokes a fallen male world, that of the heroic male fantasy, such as the Marlboro man. The man in Halber Akt (2013) seems to be in harmony with nature yet is just as unheroic: he appears as a masturbating figure with his back turned. Whilst the treatment of colour around the treetops still exhibits Richter’s typical shimmering and shining effect, a flatter and richer way of painting than before begins to reveal itself. Whereas the protagonists in his pictures directly challenge and oppose the viewer, here one becomes a voyeur of an intimate and possibly embarrassing moment – ‘Please don’t turn around!’ This small-scale painting seems to be an homage to Werner Büttner’s Selbstbildnis im Kino, onanierend (1980) which marked a turning point in Richter’s life, and would make a pivotal contribution to his own artistic career. Richter has stated: 

It made it immediately clear to me that art could have had more to do with method, attitude and a readiness to make a fool out of oneself, than with beautifying, expertise and subjectivity. Less than ten years later, I began to study under Werner Büttner (…) ² 

Whether abstract or figurative, in all of Richter’s pictures, the themes of power, sex and violence are omnipresent. This is also true of his most recent phase of work, in which self-restraint and self-imposed limitations are employed as an artistic strategy: for example, painting without a brush, so as to avoid falling into old patterns of movement. Horizontal colour gradients from blue to green and from yellow to red also bring about their own chromatic disintegration, like a neutralisation of colour. On the dull, almost two dimensional background, brightly coloured set pieces of bodies romp around. Once again the paintings are based on pre-existing photographs, this time on pornographic images from the internet. Intertwined forms, spread legs, buttocks, thighs, long arms and those grotesque masks: Asger, Bill und Mark and Francis, der Fröhliche (both 2015), the potential surnames Jorn, De Kooning, Rothko and Bacon refer to famous predecessors of recent art history, and ultimately, back to painting itself. Complex spaces emerge in the pictures, in which background and foreground are intertwined and jump back and forth. On top of these, disintegrating knots of bodies appear, which cannot be separated into unambiguous actions or distinct figures. Richter states: 

In my paintings you always see something which isn’t there. For me this is a promise, and also perhaps the reason why people paint, apart from the fact that they really just want to be left alone (…) ³