Daniel Richter is represented in most museums as a painter of psychedelic, striking Chucky the Killer Doll paintings in night vision optics. At auctions, they now fetch prices of up to one and a half million euros. This does not do justice to the artist in two respects: Until the end of the nineties, he painted exclusively abstractly, large formats with Pop Art-like Rauschenberg entanglements or graffiti-like tags in bright colors. The magnificently complex punk history paintings he has created since this abstract first half of his life only becomes clear in the comprehensive retrospective with almost seventy works, as the Kunsthalle Tübingen is now hosting the sixty-one-year-old professor of "Extended Painterly Space" at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the feuilleton.
- Follow I follow
However, Richter has only been painting figuratively since 1999 and in confrontation with Eastern art, which had been figurative for much longer, because as an abstract Western painter in the epochal Wolfsburg exhibition "German Open" he was to be juxtaposed Neo Rauch with his dream figure panopticon in the same hall – which he refused, realizing how worn out and empty the gestures of abstract expressionism had become in the meantime.
What it may have meant for a liberation from the prison of abstract immaturity, into which the viewer really sees everything and the artists cannot paint anything tangibly concrete, is demonstrated by Richter's paintings from this time on. In the monumental landscape format "Phienox" from the year 252, measuring 368 by 2000 centimetres, with the opening and ending vowels reversed in Dadaist style, as is so often the case with Richter, the burning mythical bird certainly does not rise from the ashes rejuvenated. Rather, people perish there – in front of a fire-scorched sky, which appears to be painted with thickened blood and in whose physical-looking substrate blackness and wounds seem to break open everywhere.
A subjective and individual view of history
Diagonally, the picture cuts through a strangely bright blue wall, over which a garish orange is hoisted as if burning in a smelting furnace and received irritatingly deliberate by several people on the wall ledge despite its obviously threatening condition. "Phienox" originates from Richter's phase in which the painter allowed the flood of media war images to flow through him and threw them back onto the canvas in the form of distortions inverted in form and color and solarizations in oil and acrylic. In particular, this meant that a newspaper photo of the rescue of severely wounded people from the devastating al-Qaeda bombing of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi was superimposed and picturesquely mixed with the images of the fall of the Berlin Wall or the falls of the Wall in the Eastern Bloc, which recurred in what felt like random play.
In a dialogue conducted on the occasion of the Tübingen exhibition, however, Richter also admitted that when painting these wall paintings, which oscillate between horror – the bomb attacks with the shattered embassy walls – and exuberant euphoria – the dances of joy on the former Wall of Death – he had also thought of the Christian iconography of the Descent from the Cross and the Pietà. Quite conclusive: a dead body is passed by three men (Joseph of Arimatheia, Simon of Cyrene, Nicodemus) over the hard optical barrier of a cross trunk from top to bottom and placed in the lap of its mother; from the year 1300 onwards, this lying in the womb of a dead person even became the isolated and tremendously successful pictorial form of the Pietà Vespers image "isolated". As is always the case with artists, Richter inextricably merges the process of painting with the internally stored stock of images in art history. Completely new documents of a subjective and individual view of history emerge, which refuse to be Manichean black and white good or evil.