Daniel Richter
German Artist and Publisher
Eutin, West Germany
Summary of Daniel Richter
Daniel Richter is one of the leading artists of post-reunification Germany. Heir to the legacy of the "bad art" of the German Neo-Romantics, he came to prominence in the early half of 1990s on the back of a set of abstract works rendered in a kaleidoscope of overlapping colors. At the turn of the century, however, he had started to explore intersections between abstraction and figuration. But while he is stubbornly resistant to literal interpretations of his paintings (the artist himself has said "I distrust images") Richter is inclined to draw inspiration from history painting, mass media, and pop culture, to create works that, although they might allude to certain tropes and themes, remain impossible to pin down to any definitive meaning. Richter remains perhaps best known for his penchant for vivid chromatic contrasts that create colour fields that bring to mind night-vision photography and topographic maps.
Accomplishments
- Richter's mature paintings do not acknowledge any kind of dichotomy between abstract and figurative painting. He speaks rather of only attending to the perennial problem of color and composition that all artists are compelled to address. As he says, "My work is based on only one belief system, and that's the church of painting".
- Richter has referred to his art as a kind of history painting. But these enormous pieces stop short of making explicit reference to current, historical, or mythological themes and events. Rather, signature works such as, A Flower in Flames (2012), which continue the legacy of the Romantic landscape artist, Caspar David Friedrich (one of the very few German artists he admires), do no more than hint at any historical points of reference.
- With an early background in graphic arts and punk zine culture, early abstract pieces such as 20th Century Girl (1998) saw Richter capture some of the chaotic urgency of punk rock music, using an approach he referred to as "pure materialism", which involved the development of complexes of textured and layered colors to the very edges of his canvases. Some critics have placed these pieces somewhere in a space between graffiti art and adventurous ornamentation.
- Richter has showed his willingness to rework existing images. In his 2002 painting, Still, for example, Richter took his lead from the John Everet Millais's masterpiece, Ophelia (1851-52). But, as art historian Lisa Beißwanger observed, Still appears "much more indebted to the dream worlds of the Surrealists" than to the meticulous attention to botanical detail practiced by the Pre-Raphaelites. In its sheer scale (280cm × 380cm), moreover, Richter had, in Beißwanger's words, demonstrated an ambition that had been lacking in painting "since the time of the Abstract Expressionists".
The Life of Daniel Richter
The Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery writes, "[his art conveys] an aggressive carnality that is heightened by Richter's bold use of contrasting colour. Despite the underlying violence, the works convey a touching sensuality and beauty that counterbalances their restless energy".
Progression of Art
20th Century Girl
In one of his first incursions into the fine arts (after painting punk venue posters and designing punk band T-shirts), Richter features abstract shapes and patterns of various colors and size, which are dispersed across the whole of his canvas. We find patterned structures: one diamond-shaped, and another composed of parallel strips forming a sort of ladder in a top-down perspective. The diamond is repeated twice, with variations in color, occupying large areas of the composition, while the ladder-like forms are repeated many more times across the work. There are other structures of interlaced strips in two colors, reminiscent of a ladder. Each repetition introduces new levels of distortion, until we eventually find isolated strips floating freely, and twisting into curves.
Commenting on these early pieces, Art critic Katharina Dohm wrote, "The motto seems to be horror vacui [fear of empty space] 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". The whole might be interpreted as a freestyle "jazz-like" composition, but it might just as well evoke punk music (which is built from very basic musical chords repeated obsessively and with increasing intensity). Art critic Katharina Dohm says of the artist's work of this period, "Richter always maintains control over the seemingly arbitrary pulsing chaos of the different elements, which follow a careful composition. [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".
Oil and lacquer on canvas - Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery
Phienox
Given Richter's early associations with activist groups, his involvement with the punk subculture, and his use here of a photograph of aftermath of the bombing of the US embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1998 as his source material, it would seem logical to interpret this work as a political piece. However, when taking into account the painting's title, and the artist's insistence that his paintings are primarily explorations of color and form, such interpretations become unreliable.
Phienox is one of the first work Richter produced after his evolution from abstraction to figuration. This painting also features traits that became characteristic of his later work: misspelled words as titles, the appropriation of news photography, and the visual effect of thermographic imagery to render human figures and objects. The output of thermal imaging cameras is displayed using a technique called "density slicing", a technique whereby grayscale values (the brightness of pixels in a digital image) are converted into a series of intervals - or slices - and distinct colors are assigned to each slice. The thermographic inspirations guide Richter to render the composition flat and charged with saturated oranges and other fluorescent colors. Human figures seem like a masses of warm light that becomes discernable by small variations of color.
Dohm writes that, despite their source material, the pictures of this period "do not facilitate any convincing interpretation, and often even lead the viewer astray […] Richter uncouples the underlying archive material from its context, and remixes it into something new, through which the legibility of codes and cyphers becomes difficult or impossible". Art historian Lisa Beißwanger says of Richter's paintings of this period – what she calls his "second creative phase" – that he is beginning "to explore the field of history painting, a genre with a long and weighty tradition. This gives rise to large-format, figurative paintings somewhere between black Romanticism and Surrealist paranoia, which make the painter a superstar. These works also testify to an expansion of his pool of pictorial points of reference".
Oil on canvas - Location unknown
Tarifa
Tarifa, was part of a series (produced between 2001-04) based on a recent news photograph depicting African migrants adrift on a small inflatable dinghy headed for the Spanish resort of Tarifa on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. Richter changed the original setting from daytime to nighttime with the darkness of the bluey-black water maximizing the colour contrasts between his orange dinghy and its passengers' clothing and facial features. Indeed, Richter's figures are rendered as if having been viewed through of a type of night-vision (infrared) camera device.
Media attention to this work spiked when it was featured in the Radical Figures exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 2020 (some 20 years after it was painted). In 2020, migration crises were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and critics were inclined to interpret the painting through the lens of current news events. Richter, however, wanted his viewers to contemplate the work through its formal properties, namely the expressive use of color, and the layering of abstraction over figuration.
Richter's reservations notwithstanding, Christie's auction house suggested that Tarifa "takes its place within a long legacy of shipwreck paintings: from Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa—appropriated, notably, by Kippenberger during the 1990s—to works by J. M. W. Turner and Max Beckmann. It also invites comparison with the paintings of Richter's contemporary Peter Doig, whose landmark series 100 Years Ago depicted a lone, stranded canoeist staring hauntingly out of the boat at the viewer. […] The work, in this sense, also conjures the luminous silkscreen paintings of Andy Warhol, whose depictions of race riots and car crashes asked if mass circulation of images made us immune to the tragedies within them. Here, Richter affirms the power of paint to bring these stories to life: twenty years after its creation, the image continues to resonate globally".
Oil on canvas - Private collection
Still
Still is a large piece — a painting measuring 280 × 380 cm — in which Richter continued to experiment with expressive ways of rendering figurative compositions. In Tarifa, his expressionist leanings obscure the figures' identities while simultaneously highlighting their facial gesture. With Still we see a different approach. Instead of being covered by variegated texture and patterns, the human figures in Still glow in a manner that erases all facial expression. Three of the upright figures are waist-deep in the water with their shadows formed of the green stagnant waters. With the red headed figure on the right, there is the hit of a second shadow. These figures appear to being spied upon by two others from behind a tree on the banks of the lake.
However, it is the giant naked figure floating on his back that draws the viewers' eye. This figure, and the dominant green color scheme, seem to be have been inspired by John Everet Millais's Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, Ophelia (1851-52) (and a mere 76.2 cm × 111.8 cm by way of scale comparison), the tragic heroine from Shakespeare's, Hamlet. Richter's "Ophelia" shares the same color as the figures in the river, but the texture is not flat; subtle variations of color evoke an anguished face and the bones of a body that either lacks nourishment or is a corpse in the early stages of decomposition. Art historian Lisa Beißwanger comments, "Richter is not interested in some 'aestheticization' of the world to create a nostalgic feeling in the present. On the contrary, he uses [his] painting technique to design gloomy, nightmarish scenarios that appear much more indebted to the dream worlds of the Surrealists, and which achieve monumental dimensions – something that has only been conceivable in modern painting since the time of the Abstract Expressionists".
Oil and ink on canvas - Location unknown
A Flower in Flames
A Flower in Flames is a reimagination of Caspar David Friedrich's, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). Curator Katharina Dohm writes, "We encounter [a] figure from behind in A Flower in Flames: he seems tiny, outfitted with a turban and machine gun before an imposing and vivid mountain landscape, calling to mind the famous painting by [German Romantic landscape artist] 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 […] evokes a fallen male world, that of the heroic male fantasy". Richter delineates his mountainous terrain using his now signature thermographic technique. Using this effect to render the landscape (rather than human figures) generates an effect that resembles a topographic map. The background and mountains are in shades of red and orange; two mountains are in dark ochre colors, while the other mountains are presented in bright yellow topographic lines. In the middle of the frame stands the wanderer/soldier, contrasting in blue, beholding the vista that is unfolding before him.
A Flower in Flames is one of a series in which Richter employed the turban as a motif. The iconic headgear alluded to recent conflicts between the West and the Middle East, and especially the recent killing of the founder of the terrorist group, al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. Commenting on the series, art historian Isabelle Moffat writes, "While relying on our familiarity with wartime imagery, Richter transcends the events of recent years and cites conventions of the sublime, tropes of Romantic landscape painting as well as kitschy postcards, cigarette ads and cheesy book covers which have indelibly imprinted our imaginary landscapes with lonely heroic figures. The paintings constitute an effort to investigate the iconicity of these figures while consistently undercutting notions of pathos". Richter, however, discussed the painting only in formal tones and his art within the history of German painting. He said: "It seems that German art is actually ugly. I mean, aside from Hans Holbein, most German art, traditionally, from Cranach on, is ugly, or it's just miserable, particularly in the nineteenth century. Okay, Caspar David Friedrich established a Romantic language, but aside from that, it's just lame, boring shit".
Oil on canvas - Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery
Einmal ohne
Around 2020, Richter came across a collection of First World War postcards, one of which, was taken in the town of Haparanda on the Swedish-Finnish border. The image shows two German soldiers on their journey home, both missing a leg, and supported by crutches. Posing side-by-side for the photographer, art historian Eva Meyer-Hermann writes, "the crutches each man is using in place of a leg seem to turn them into a single organism. At the same time the lines of the simple orthopedic aids look like graphic symbols in a cumulative, almost surreal body-figure. What kinds of bodies are these, what sort of homunculi is the war sending back? Nothing else so effectively visualizes the cruelty of war as images of the war-wounded".
Einmal ohne (Once without) formed part of a series called Limbo. It was unveiled at the Ateneo Veneto center for Sciences, Literature and Arts in Venice in the Spring of 2022. Established by a Napoleonic Decree in 1812, the Veneto is one of Venice's oldest cultural institutions. But the building itself dates back to the 15th century when it was home to two religious societies that merged to provide spiritual support to those lost souls who had been sentenced to death by hanging. However, prior to their execution, the condemned men would be dressed in a symbolic robe before being subjected to torture and mutilation (in the name of holy penitence). Richter explained the Limbo title thus: "It is a building where for a couple hundred years a Catholic fraternity begged God for forgiveness for prisoners sentenced to death. But begging forgiveness did not mean that they would be guaranteed direct access to heaven or protect you from hell. Once you gave them your money, they would only guarantee that you would end up in Limbo after death".
Einmal ohne is indicative of Richter's return to abstraction while retaining a discernable figurative suggestion. The body shape appears split in two: one half rendered in bright, light pinks and whites; the other darker in tone, with gradations of green and blue. The limbs, face, and other details are sufficiently distorted to make them difficult to decipher. It is unclear at what point the arms transform into instruments or whether they are merely bent out of shape. A strange, face-like shape in the chest, meanwhile, creates the impression that the head has been displaced. Meyer-Hermann writes "The bodies in these [Limbo] paintings are present, but they are also tragic, because they can no longer support themselves. They are shoved together, they are too bold, they fake beauty, but what is inside them is ugly, existential, unstoppable. It is impossible to recount their contents, no narration in the world could provide them with a moral basis. These are paintings that operate beyond language".
Oil on canvas - Location unknown
Biography of Daniel Richter
Early Life
One of four siblings, Daniel Richter was born in 1962 in Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein, West Germany. When his father moved out of the family home, the sixteen-year-old Daniel went to live with his grandmother in the suburban town of Lütjenburg, in the Ostholstein region. It was in his grandmother's loft that he discovered a cache of old comic books. These provided the stimulus for his early interest in drawing and graphics. It was in sleepy suburbs of Lütjenburg that he, with close friend, Rocko Schamoni, discovered the writings of Karl Marx and the anarchistic punk rock music scene. Richter adopted a rebellious persona that led to his expulsion from high school. He then relocated to Hamburg (a distance of 120 kilometers from Lütjenburg).
Looking back on this "full and exciting" period of his life, Richter recalled: "In the early 1980s when I was young, punk was the way out. So, I moved to Hamburg. Hamburg was a city with lots of squatters and a red-light district with a certain underground appeal. I couldn't make music and I didn't want to make music because you have to rehearse with others, which is how I realized I could draw. So that was the natural role the subculture chose for me". Richter joined the Autonome Antifa, a radical left-wing organization born of a reaction to recent neo-Nazi attacks in Hamburg.
Richter found himself officially "homeless"; the German government provided a meagre living subsidy of 72 marks a month. Richter earned extra money painting covers and posters for punk concerts, and designing T-shirts. Influenced by the likes of Disney, John Heartfield, George Grosz and "that kind of Dada influence", he said, "the idea of having an anarchist collective designing a whole identity for a band and accidentally becoming the role model for millions of idiot punk bands afterwards is quite funny. If there was a band I really liked and they appealed to me, I would do artwork for them, and if somebody needed a poster for an antifascist action concert, I would also do that".
Education and Early Career
Richter did not celebrate German unification. He said, "When the wall came down [in November 1989], it was clear that the fun times were over. The wave of patriotism, the whole 'Wir Sind Ein Volk' ['we are one people'] feeling was just not my thing. […] It was a kind of crisis for me that forced me to rethink my life. For this reason I started studying art, which opened a lot of possibilities for me, also in terms of understanding my motivations". Richter enrolled at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg in 1992.
His portfolio, which contained his Grosz-inspired caricatures - according to Richter, the drawings were "brimming with disrespect for established painter colleagues and explicit humour" - was rejected by the academy's selection committee. However, Werner Büttner (who, with Martin Kippenberger, was one of the leading figures in the recent revival in expressive painting) saw promise in Richter's work and took him on as one of his students. Büttner encouraged Richter to pursue an expressive and abstract style, but Richter remained somewhat ambivalent towards the value of formal arts education. He recalled, "After two or three years I got dismissed because I didn't attend the courses. I came to a point where I understood that I can't learn any more". Despite these misgivings, Richter did concede that the school "was a free space to do something that you cannot do anywhere else" while also coming to the realization that "you can be an artist in your kitchen but then you're not really part of the art system".
Towards the end of the decade, Richter was introduced (by Büttner) to Albert Oehlen for whom he worked as an assistant. Indeed, Richter's earliest works take their inspiration from Büttner's and Oehlen's expressive/abstract leanings. Art critic Katharina Dohm wrote (in 2017), "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".
By the early 2000s, Richter, who had taken up a visiting professorship at his old university in Hamburg in 2003, had evolved towards a semi-figurative style, with his silhouette figures rendered as if they were captured through thermal (night vision) cameras. Christie's auction house writes, "Among his influences was Neo Rauch, whose strange, otherworldly tableaux responded to the changing political and cultural landscape of his time. He was equally influenced by his encounters with the work of Pierre Bonnard at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which—he believed—offered an important precedent for exploring the relationship between paint and photography". In 2005 Richter took up the post of Professor at Berlin University of the Arts, and the following year, at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In 2008, Richter began to design sets for the Salzburg Festival. He worked on modernist operas including Béla Bartók's, Bluebeard's Castle, and Alban Berg's, Lulu.
Mature Period
In 2010 Richter relocated from Hamburg to Berlin with his wife Angela, a theater director and journalist. Angela Richter had interviewed individuals connected to the WikiLeaks scandals of 2006 and these made their way into a 2019 book, Supernerds – Conversations with Heroes by Alexander Verlag, which was illustrated with portraits and drawings by her husband. Mystery surrounds the actual date of their marriage, but Richter claimed that by the time they arrived in Berlin they had been married for nineteen years. (The couple, who are parents to two children, are now divorced.)
In 2016 Richter presented his one-man Wild Thing exhibition at the Regent Projects in Los Angels (his third collaboration with the gallery). With titles including, Wild Thing, Gaining Knowledge, Another Wasted Year, and Das Unbekannte Meisterwerk (all 2016), the works, according to the exhibition publicity, adhered "to a new methodology [that] upends the narrative structures associated with his earlier paintings. Prioritizing the palette knife above the paintbrush, Richter's works render the process by which they were made visible to the viewer. […] A myriad of painterly techniques ranging from thin washes reminiscent of graffiti to broad swathes of color combine to create theatrical stages featuring transparent ghost-like figures opaquely rendered on the surface of the canvas".
In 2018 Richter founded Pampam Publishing with his partner, Austrian photographer, Hanna Putz. Pampam is a platform for international artists, which has published much of Putz's work and her collaborations. Two years later Richter and Putz were married, dividing their time equally between Vienna and Berlin.
Recently, Richter's style has reverted to a purer form of abstraction. Without patterns or repeated motifs, these works feel freer in form and less restricted in color. Sometimes formed shapes resemble human forms (and even genitals) while as other times they are pure abstraction. Art historian Lisa Beißwanger writes, "When asked about his sources of inspiration, Richter never mentions representatives of classic history painting, but favors modern painters. A particular reference for him is the artistic group known as Les Nabis. […] In actual fact, Richter's works show pictorial parallels with the works of Félix Vallotton and Pierre Bonnard, particularly in the dissolution of the subject matter into ornamental structures and juxtaposed color fields, which meld to create a shimmering, image-filling whole".
In 2019 Richter was part of a group exhibition (at Finland's Epsoo Museum of Modern Art)) with artists Jonathan Meese and Tal R (German and Danish respectively), called The Men Who Fell off Earth (a play on the title of the 1976 Nicolas Roeg science fiction movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie). Billed as a "fresh take on Neo Expressionism", each artist was represented individually but they also collaborated on an installation and a video piece. The collaborative pieces were described in the catalogue as follows: "The trio share their observations on the sad state of the world through a veil of absurdist humour and playful performativity". Richter said of the collaboration, "It's great to meet and do things that you would never do alone. It's liberating. It's not so much like a band. It's more like three individuals decide to make music with chairs, trombones, and a refrigerator. I love it because it's also making a fool out of yourself".
Richter unveiled two connected series, Limbo, and Stupor, in 2022 and 2023 respectively. All the pieces saw Richter overlap the boundaries between abstraction and figuration but differing slightly in their thematic and emotional focus. The former features distorted figures balanced in a state of suspension (limbo, or perhaps, purgatory), while the latter are more grotesque and solitary. Richter said of the works, "I made paintings inspired by an old postcard photo of two German soldiers on crutches. [To me they] looked like weird insects".
In 2025 Richter unveiled a new collection of large scale works at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Salzburg titled, Mit elben Birnen (With Eleven Pears). His distorted human forms are foregrounded against fields of vivid and energetic color tones. The obscure title of the exhibition was influenced by the opening line of Friedrich Hölderlin's poem, "Hälfte des Lebens" ("Half of Life") (1804-04), which reads, "With its yellow pears, and wild roses everywhere". As the Gallery explains, "The poem is centred around a stark contrast between idealised beauty and a world marked by emptiness. The lines, which sound almost prophetic in today's political climate, accompanied Richter during the creation of this series".
The Legacy of Daniel Richter
A former pupil and studio assistant respectively of Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen, Richter is often cited as heir to the legacy of German Neo-Expressionism. The Neo Expressionists painters railed against aesthetic standards in favor of a more subversive approach, but Richter revised Albert Oehlen's famous motto, "high art through low art" to read "low art through high art". Through his shifts between organic abstraction and amorphous figuration, his preference for the grandeurs of history painting, and a total investment in the principle of "painting as painting", and painting "for its own sake", he, like his predecessors, carried a painterly challenge to proponents of Minimalism.
Curator Dr. Nicole Fritz writes, "Richter's vibrant and multifaceted stream of paintings draws both from existing pictorial worlds and from inner visions – it is subjective and at the same time collective. By emotionally charging clichés from popular culture, the media, and stylistic elements from art history, Richter carries on the expressionistic gesture of immediacy in a conceptual way and once again questions the possibilities of painting, above and beyond stylistic definitions". In addition to his impressive creative output (he has produced over 1000 pieces), Richter has served as a professor, and mentored emerging artists including Christian Rosa and Marc Jung. Some of his mentees have even set out with the specific goal of becoming Richter's apprentices. These include analogue photographer, Sophie Thun, and Danja Akulin, known for his large format pencil drawings.