Daniel Richter, Lonely Old Slogan, 2006, oil on canvas, 250 x 280.1 x 4.5 cm, © Collection Falckenberg, Hamburg, © Photograph Jochen Littkemann, Berlin, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.

GEM Museum
voor Actuele Kunst
Stadhouderslaan 43
31 (0)70 - 33 811 33
The Hague
Daniel Richter, Retrospective
October 20, 2007-
March 24, 2008

Few people have done as much as Daniel Richter (b. 1962) to set the tone for German painting since the 1990s. His first major retrospective at the GEM will show how his massive paintings weave together elements from history, art history and the mass media to create highly idiosyncratic images that often display an extreme sensitivity to contemporary political events. In addition to many large-format oil paintings, the exhibition will include a selection of sketches never previously on show to the public. Richter uses these both as a diary and as a source of inspiration.

Daniel Richter trained at the art school in Hamburg and worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen (b. 1954). His first paintings were abstracts, painted in bright colours and a psychedelic style which lay somewhere between graffiti and interlacing ornamentation. His points of reference were Surrealism, the ‘underground’ and the intertwined grotesques of Italian Mannerism. The millennium brought a complete change of direction in Richter’s work: he switched from abstraction to the human form. Since then, his paintings have been exclusively figurative. His large-format canvases crowded with figures, inspired by reproductions in newspapers or history books, convey an extraordinarily vivid impression of strife and menace. Richter’s switch to figurative painting was widely celebrated as the rebirth of history painting. However, it is a rebirth under a different star: whereas traditional history paintings were open to only one interpretation, Richter’s images are far more ambiguous.

One of the key themes in his work is the failure of the modern utopia. He also likes to refer to politically charged events, often in a disguised form, and to draw on the collective memory of our global village. His 2003 painting Duueh, for example, shows a number of human figures apparently plummeting earthwards. Richter’s handling of the paint creates a striking impression of speed and of figures in the grip of gravity. The painting raises associations with the victims who sprang from the flames of the World Trade Centre on 9/11: an image seared into the visual memory of each one of us. However, the background in the picture is nothing like the urban landscape of downtown New York; it is more reminiscent of some picturesque Italian village. The subjects of Richter’s work display a constant ambivalence. Most of his works can therefore be regarded as ‘puzzles’ which challenge the viewer’s imagination and knowledge of politics.

The exhibition was organised in cooperation with Hamburger Kunsthalle and is accompanied by a catalogue containing essays by Dietmar Dath, Christoph Heinrich and Kitty Scott (published by DuMont, price € 28).

Daniel Richter, Die Aufklärung, 2005, oil on canvas, 220 x 170.1 x 4.2 cm, © Verzameling / Collection Hugo Jung/Hamburger Kunsthalle, © Photograph Jochen Littkemann, Berlin, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.

Daniel Richter, Tuwenig, 2004, 212 x 261 cm.

Daniel Richter, Nerdon, 2004 Oil on canvas, 260 x 360 cm, Loaned by Hort Collection, New York, © Hort Collection, New York © Photograph Jochen Littkemann, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts.

Daniel Richter, Still, 2002, Oil and lacquer on canvas, 280 x 280 x 3.6 cm.

Daniel Richter, Untitled, 2003, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm.

Hamburger Kunsthalle
Stiftung öffentlichen Rechts
Glockengießerwall
+49 (0) 40 428 131 200
Hamburg
Daniel Richter –
A Major Survey
May 4-August 5, 2007

Like few others, Daniel Richter has set the tone of painting in Germany since the 1990s. Richter combines clichés from art history, the mass media and popular culture in large-format oil paintings, thus creating unusual narrative pictorial worlds. Daniel Richter – A Major Survey provides an overview of his painting to date, and is being mounted in close collaboration with the artist. More than 50 large paintings will be on show, and, for the first time, a selection from the series of more than 400 small formats, which serve Richter both as sketches of ideas and as a diary.

Richter studied at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste under Werner Büttner and was an assistant to Albert Oehlen. His first paintings were abstract, their strongly colourful psychedelic cosmos of forms oscillating between graffiti and ornament. Surrealism, underground and the intertwined grotesques of Italian mannerism were his points of orientation.

At the turn of the millennium, Richter turned from the abstract mesh to the human body, and since then his painting has been exclusively figurative. In large scenes with myriad figures, often inspired by reproductions in newspapers or history books, he portrays themes of strife and threat with an excessive vitality. Richter's return to figurative painting was widely celebrated as the rebirth of history painting — albeit a rebirth under a different sign. Whereas history painting relied on clearly legible pictorial narratives and aimed to legitimate the present by calling on the past, Richter's paintings deal with the failure of modernism's utopias. ‘I was interested in how to reference the world and the image of the world as I perceive it or wish to describe it’, is how the artist himself explained the change.

Some of the themes of the paintings he then produced were, for example, the failed communist uprising in Hamburg Barmbek in 1923 (Nerdon) or the overloaded rubber dinghies transporting refugees from North Africa (Fatifa). Frequently the motifs and readings of Richter's paintings are characterized by a significant ambivalence. His first figurative work, Phienox, for example, presents a dramatically charged scene in which people are helping to heave a man over a high wall. It was painted in the year 2000, just as the tenth anniversary of German reunification was being commemorated. A newspaper photograph documenting the events surrounding the terrorist attack on the American embassy in Nairobi, however, inspired the painting. Most of Richter's paintings are picture puzzles of this kind, which the viewer has to complete with the help of his own knowledge and ideas of politics and popular culture.

Curator of the exhibition is Dr. Christoph Heinrich.

Daniel Richter, Poor Girl,, 2005, Oil on canvas, 214 x 258 x 4.2 cm, Loaned by Dr. Joachim Plum, Belgien , © Dr. Joachim Plum, Belgien , © Photograph Jochen Littkemann, Berlin, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.