DANIEL RICHTER

Lives and works in Berlin (DE)

Daniel Richter is one of the foremost German artists of his generation, whose practice has evolved over time to encompass notable stylistic turns. Richter’s paintings synthesize art history, mass media, politics, sex, and contemporary culture into ever-changing pictorial worlds. The artist maintains that the dichotomy between abstract and figurative painting is a constructed fiction, since the formal problems of color and composition remain constant. This framework for thinking about painting continues to inform the development of Richter’s approach.

The tension played out in Richter’s large-scale compositions is elevated by the colors and forms he uses and lends the works a ludic quality. The compression between figures expresses a range of dynamics, proposing powerful intersubjective experiences through the convergence of forms. The interplay of strongly defined silhouettes and the subtle gradations of each background creates a balance between abstraction and figuration. In the words of the artist “My concern is with the surface, this flat, tangled, never-changing scheme of figure constellations, in and out”

Richter was trained at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, Hamburg (DE). From 2004 to 2006 he was Professor of Painting at Universität der Künste in Berlin (DE). Since 2006, Richter has held a professorship at Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna (AT).

Selected collections: Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig (DE); The Roberts Institute of Art (RIA), London (UK); Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO (US); Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt am Main (DE); Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin (DE); Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris (FR); Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (DE); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (DE); Kunsthalle, Kiel (DE); Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart (DE); Kunstmuseum,

The Hague (NL); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk (DK); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg (FR); Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (US); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (CA); Sammlung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Munich (DE) Sammlung Boros, Berlin (DE); Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg (AT); Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (DE); Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (DE); Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels (BE), among others.

Courtesy GRIMM