the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Daniel Richter

IDS attends the Fall 2008 Alex Katz Chair Lecture by Daniel Richter

This lecture took place on October 21st, 2008 at 6:30 pm in the Great Hall at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

Daniel Richter’s paintings are elaborate in their deconstruction and recodification of art history. Drawing a wide range of reference from Goya, Munch, Ensor, to Immendorff and Doig, Richter offers a revisionist position for the crisis of painting in the 21st century.

Richter’s work is often read with political motive. Working in the genre of epic historical painting, his images are fraught with a painterly anxiety. His work is infused with an apocalyptic energy, reflective of media induced paranoia. Beneath his highly seductive surfaces lies the portent of instability, violence, alienation and ideological subversion of a contemporary world in constant flux.

Taking his subjects from pictures found in newspapers, comics, album and book covers, Richter repositions contemporary media imagery in the form of theatrical tableaux that are fantastical and timeless.

His nightmarish scenes are both terrifying and beautiful: rebellious mobs attacking the Berlin wall are staged with medieval religious zeal; gatherings of vagabonds glow with paranormal threat. Laden with the weight of implied history, Richter’s scenes extend beyond emblematic reading; their narratives take on the qualities of magical realism, extending a shiver of supernatural barbarism to depictions of current affairs.

Richter’s canvases are imbued with an alchemic affinity for paint. Copious techniques and applications deceptively flaunt the process of making, yet remain elusive in their overwhelming complexity. Richter handles paint with an unwieldy passion: every colour in his controlled chaos retains its magnetic purity, he creates depth that seems to grow, like an organic force, from within the canvas.

Richter’s paintings radiate with their own internal light, bringing his dreamy scenes of contemporary fable to life with enduring authority.

- Text written by Patricia Ellis

About Daniel Richter

Daniel Richter was born in 1962 in Lüthenburg, Germany and now lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg, Germany.  In the early 1990s, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg under Werner Büttner.  Richter is currently the focus of an expansive survey, which traveled in 2007 from Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany to Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Den Haag, The Netherlands and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Málaga, Spain. It opens October 4, 2008 at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado—his first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Richter’s work has been included in numerous, recent group exhibitions including Passion for Art: 35th Anniversary of the Essl Collection, Essl Museum Contemporary Art, Vienna, Austria; Paint It Blue: ACT Art Collection Siegfried Loch, Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany (both 2007); Tokyo-Berlin/Berlin-Tokyo, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; and The Triumph of Painting: Part IV, Saatchi Gallery, London, England (both 2006).

Relevant Links

• Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.
• David Zwirner Gallery