DANIEL RICHTER

June 5- July 12, 2003

Daniel Richter was born in 1962 at Eutin, Germany. He studied at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, Hamburg. He lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg.

Daniel Richter started producing his first abstract works in the mid 1990’s. These works were characterized by graffity-like features as much in the form and colours as in their titles, features which provide them with a certain kind of urgency. Within a few years the artist developed a personal pictorial idiom comprising of abstract, chaotic labyrinths. Up until 1999 Daniel Richter had been marketed as one of the greatest representatives of the New Abstraction. From the end of the 90’s, however, isolated figurative markers started to emerge in his works, in the shape of distorted features.

Since then, the artist creates monumental, representational paintings drawn from images of social struggle found in newspapers. Although the colours he uses are quite vivid, Richter’s works take us into dark and uncomfortable places. Colour adds to the drama of the distorted human figures that glow like phosphorescent apparitions. The space from where these figures emerge is ambiguous and hard to be defined, resisting all the rational notions of space and traditional aesthetics.

In Richter’s works dominates social struggle: riotous mobs, conflicts and eruptions where the instigator and the victim cannot be distinguished. Although his work is undeniably political, himself avoids to present personal comments and irony through his paintings and avoids taking sides. In the centre of his interest is found everything that is closely bound in with contemporary society, the big city, its majorities and minorities and their specific modes of action. Richter’s works present violence and destruction as the driving force in contemporary society.