The German artist Daniel Richter (b. 1962) is regarded as one of the most important artists of a generation which also includes Scottish Peter Doig (b. 1959) and Danish Tal R (b. 1967). With this mid-career retrospective exhibition, Louisiana presented Richter’s development from the earliest efforts until today.
Daniel Richter arrived on the art scene in the 1990s with a highly expressive abstract formal idiom that evoked associations with his earliest artistic career as a designer of album covers for a number of punk rock bands in Germany in the 1980s. Since the years around the turn of the century, however, Richter exclusively painted figurative pictures, often described – also by himself – as a kind of new history painting. But they lacked any reproduction of specific historical events; the pictures rather captured a particular contemporary spirit, marked by the death of the great political utopias.
Richter’s paintings were both thematically and formally related to German Expressionism and painters such as Max Beckmann (1884-1950) and George Grosz (1893-1959), who, in the years before World War II, painted acerbic, humorous, and profoundly socially critical allegorical pictures. Daniel Richter took a similar approach to painting, which, according to him, was always ideologically positioned in relation to the surrounding world.
ART ON HIGH ALERT
Daniel Richter was deeply rooted in the political and cultural life of his time. His paintings were highly communicative and full of scenes and subjects that spectators recognized and were easily drawn to. Sometimes the artist took his subjects from the flow of images that surrounded people permanently as citizens of a media society; sometimes they were freely invented, but even so, addressed things that happened or could have happened. Almost like a kind of political theatre – this was art on high alert.
DOIG & RICHTER & TAL R - A POWERFUL SEQUENCE
It was not a coincidence that this comprehensive presentation of Daniel Richter followed the Louisiana showing in 2015 of Peter Doig and that the museum in 2017 added yet another painter to the sequence, namely Danish Tal R. Peter Doig was born in 1959, Daniel Richter in 1962, and Tal R in 1967 – in other words, give or take a few years, they were all from the same generation and, in fact, also knew one another.
All three of them were figurative painters; they told stories from and about their time in different ways – and all had an emancipated attitude to the medium of painting. It might have been difficult to work out why they actually became painters, but painters they were, and paint they did – apparently undaunted by the claims about the death of painting that typified their generation during their youth.
