The Horde of Daniel Richter
Daniel Richter: “It has become so difficult to be radical left”
They are special collectibles. Once a year, WELT publishes an artist edition, this year it is designed by one of the most important contemporary painters in Germany: Daniel Richter.
Daniel Richter became famous with his flickering history paintings on mass media, sub- and pop culture and a painting that has remained unique. An exploration of his best-known works – and their impact to this day.
Secure your WELT artist edition by Daniel Richter. We will deliver your copy directly to your home for only €4.80. Here is the order page.
You can find more WELT artist editions at www.welt.de/kuenstler
Daniel Richter’s fascinating and challenging work has been the subject of solo exhibitions by many important institutions, such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and the Kunstmuseum Basel.
Source: bpk/Städel Museum; VG Bild Kunst Bonn, 2022
The first retrospective after twelve years of painting practice was shown in 2007 in the museum of the city where Richter became an artist: the Kunsthalle Hamburg. The title of the show was “The Palette” and was also a tribute to the writer Hubert Fichte, who wrote perhaps the best German pop novel of all time about the legendary basement bar Palette in Hamburg in the 1960s.
The front page of Daniel Richter’s WELT artist edition of October 14, 2022
Source: world
Daniel Richter is a declared fan of this author, whose sprawling “Story of Sensitivity” anticipated many of the things that still concern our society today: the aftermath of colonialism, the lure of distant countries, gender trouble, sexuality in all shades and the necessity and difficulty of one’s own to tell life.
Hubert Fichte, who died of AIDS in 1985, was no longer able to complete the planned nineteen volumes of this opus magnum – as an author he was somewhat forgotten in the increasingly narrow-minded German literature. Not with Daniel Richter. In 2002, the painter named an exhibition after a Fichte work: “Grünspan”, loosely based on the novel “Detlevs Imitationen Grünspan” from 1971.
When an artist binds himself to another character with references, it is never without reason. It is always a program. Daniel Richter’s painting is cosmopolitan and saturated with references, but not academic, just as Hubert Fichte, despite his decades of ethnographic investigations, never became a scientist but always remained a poet. The flowing and associative are more important to both than the systematic and articulated.
Thumbs down: A finance page from Daniel Richter’s WELT artist issue of October 14, 2022
Source: world
Daniel Richter’s figurative paintings from the 2000s lightly layered on top of each other things that don’t usually lie side by side: art history and mass media, sub- and pop culture. Crowded forest scenes and bare pedestrian zones, monkeys in wheelchairs and squads of people who look like they were irradiated (“Horde”, Städel, Frankfurt). A latent threat emanates from state power. On “Lonely Old Slogan” (2006) the character from behind wore a studded jacket with the inscription “Fuck the Police” – the romanticism of the 19th century and the slogans of the harbor street squatted in the eighties collide. Only painting can do that. Accordingly, these often large-format works are in demand.
Comeback 2015 in Frankfurt
They are modern history pictures that have been created, except that this history is not over yet – you are still in the middle of it. This is due to the painterly quality on the one hand and the ambivalence of the subjects on the other. In 2002, at a show by Richter in the K21 art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf, a critic of Deutschlandfunk associated the very different influences of Jackson Pollock, Arnold Böcklin, James Ensor and Hieronymus Bosch – and, looking at a Richter canvas, wondered whether she was dealing with the case of the Berlin Wall in front of him, a burial or at least a sexually motivated act of violence. Daniel Richter processed a press photo of the 1998 bomb attack on the American embassy in Nairobi. So an event that was still part of the present in 2002.
But Richter wouldn’t be Richter if there weren’t any ruptures with him. At the beginning of the 1910s, the painter came back from vacation one day and couldn’t stand his own paintings anymore. It took Richter three years to find new formulations that applied to him. He returned transformed in 2015, in the Frankfurt Schirn, one of the best museums in the country, and showed largely abstract creatures and nasty colors.
The characters seemed to stress each other out on the sparse space instead of getting lost in complex tableaux, but what does it matter? “It doesn’t matter,” Richter once said in an interview, “whether I paint an old punk, a steel fist or an abstract, lyrical composition. My painting is interesting because color does something for me that it doesn’t do for others.”
Secure your WELT artist edition by Daniel Richter. We will deliver your copy directly to your home for only €4.80. Here is the order page.
You can find more WELT artist editions at www.welt.de/kuenstler