Daniel Richter: Music for Orgies
GRIMM is proud to announce the third solo exhibition by Daniel Richter with the gallery in Amsterdam. The opening of the exhibition coïncides with the Amsterdam Art Weekend.
In these new works, figuration has been fragmented and distilled to a minimum. Sharp lines depict the contours of body parts, strengthened by vivid, vibrant hues that create a suggestion of movement. The interplay of the strong silhouettes and the subtle gradation of color in the back- ground balances between abstraction and figuration. In this way Richter’s paintings liberate in their openness to interpretation. Undercurrents of violence, isolation, awkwardness and oppression abound, while absurdity, surrealism, confusion and the pure attractiveness of colors and shapes lend the works a ludic quality.
The works exhibited in Music for Orgies are a continuation Richter’s radical departure from his style of the last decade: “I wanted to get away from a certain kind of narration and from the theatre stage and from the burden of already knowing what I’m about to do”, Richter stated last year. “When I started in the 90s, I was mainly interested in the idea of how chaotic or crammed a painting can be: To the point that it collapses. And then I also all the time had an interest in doing something that I would call image-related. Image in relation to ideology and the production of ideology and clichés.”
In the new paintings the figures and forms are more defined and explicit. Pornographic imagery is a source and a blue- print for Richter to explore energy, movement, surface and color. He is interested in the information layer an image can provide and by the way that this is done in relation to the pictorial layer.
Richter researches how these two merge and together create the aesthetic “Mehrwert” as he calls it, or aesthetic surplus in English.
