In the past 30 years the work of German painter Daniel Richter has rarely stood still. Throughout his career he has probed pattern and gesture, swung between abstraction and realism, and captured the disquiet of modern Europe. When I ask the artist if he ever gets tired of asking himself what’s next, he responds in the frank manner for which he has become known: “No, I would say the main challenge for myself is to not be bored.”
We meet at his studio in the Schöneberg neighbourhood of Berlin on a rainy autumn afternoon. Entering from the damp street, you are suddenly confronted with bright red canvases inhabited by strange forms: amorphous grey figures encircled with black lines, shot through with patches of canary, azure, apricot and emerald.
Destined for an exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac in London, these vibrant works are the latest to spring from a phase of abstraction that began in the mid-2010s. They are a reminder that although Richter (no relation to Gerhard) finds himself at the height of his career — the 60-year-old is a major figure in German contemporary art, his paintings can fetch more than $1mn at auction and he has just closed a retrospective at the Kunsthalle Tübingen in Baden-Württemberg — the formal and aesthetic qualities of his oeuvre never stop shifting.
“They’re much more free of conventions,” he says of these new pieces. “As a painter, I feel more free, or like a kid in the bakery. Before, you’re standing outside the bakery. You see a lot of nice cake, but you can’t touch it. And now I feel like I’m in the bakery and throwing cake around.”
During our conversation, Richter speaks in a way that mirrors his multi-faceted paintings — bursting with profanities, analogies, dark humour and references to different artists and historical periods.
Born in northern West Germany in 1962, Richter was in his late twenties by the time of the country’s unification, a turbulent period whose tensions he would later capture with a combustive energy. After a stint designing record sleeves for punk bands in Hamburg, he describes how his “deep interest in producing and understanding images” pushed him to enrol at the city’s University of Fine Arts.
Critics have made much of these underground beginnings, especially when it comes to the artist’s early paintings from the 1990s, busy abstract affairs that have been likened to graffiti. But it’s clear that such biographical readings irk Richter. “It’s not necessary to know that I’ve been in a certain subculture,” he says. “Looking at [these works] now, I think mainly I was trying to find out two things: what was the promise of non-narrative art — like free jazz, there was a certain radicalism in it — and I was interested in chaos, when a structure is so overloaded that it may not be readable anymore.”
Soon a different kind of chaos took over as Richter moved from inscrutable compositions towards figuration. The artist is best known for his narrative works of the early 2000s whose grand scale and crowded surfaces recall the drama of history painting. These darkly arresting panoramas often drew on sociopolitical themes and current events — xenophobic attacks, murders, demonstrations — pitting troubling subjects against ornamentation to striking effect.
In “Billard um halbzehn” (2001), an arson attack against refugee housing that took place in Lübeck in 1996 is reimagined as a ghoulish landscape: phantasmal figures rave around a fire in a forest bathed in toxic greens, a shuttered building looming behind. “Dog Planet” (2002) presents a wall of armoured policemen holding flame-coloured hounds on taut leashes. In “Tarifa” (2001), a group of figures huddle in an orange dinghy adrift on a Stygian ocean. Despite the tense atmosphere, the mosaic-like patterns of their jackets dazzle — the painterly sublime turned psychedelic nightmare.
With their lurid colours and ominous mood, these grim scenarios presented an anxious portrait of the world. Two decades on, they remain achingly relevant. When “Tarifa” was included in the 2020 Radical Figures exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, it was imbued with a new poignancy in light of the current migrant crisis, a scene of suffering that seemed to be pulled straight out of media reports.
However Richter avoids making clear-cut connections between paint and politics in these works. “I think the paintings definitely relate to real-world issues but the awareness is more analytical,” he says. “Even with a work like ‘Tarifa’, I didn’t want it to be about, let’s say, African migrants. They’re neon-coloured people that are a reflection of fear, paranoia and observation.”
The artist prefers instead to view his output from this period as part of his exploration of the possibilities of the medium, in this case, painting’s ability to embrace juxtaposition: “I thought it would be interesting to transform a sad image into a beautiful painting. So I think the paradoxes are more the things that interested me in those days.”
Our conversation turns to the zeitgeist for representational art that addresses identity politics or societal questions, a lot of which Richter, in a characteristically unfiltered way, describes as “really shitty socialist realism just gone west”.
“People seem to be giving themselves the order right now to make something to do with certain political or social issues,” he says. “But it is still boring painting, like GDR paintings with more colour.”
Eventually Richter himself grew tired of “hopping from one political image to another”. In the mid-2010s he began to strip back his pictorial language and focus on the figure, depicting torsos and limbs splitting, flailing and contorting in a frenzy of colour. These anguished bodies were brought into dramatic dialogue with Italian Renaissance painting at an exhibition at the Ateneo Veneto during last year’s Venice Biennale.
Titled Limbo, the show presented works based on a photograph of two wounded first world war soldiers in an art-filled palazzo which originally housed a confraternity that looked after prisoners sentenced to death. “I thought it was a great place to show, also in relation to the subtle violence in the paintings because all of them related to these two men that had lost their legs,” says Richter.
Such works assert Richter’s belief that, although he has again edged closer to abstraction, “all good work relates to the real world”. “Now I can look back at a certain amount of my work and see there’s a certain stress,” he says. “I think it relates to how I see the world. There is a lot of control and aggression and desire and fear, and there’s beauty as much as ugliness.”
‘Stupor’ runs at Thaddaeus Ropac, London, to December 1, ropac.net