Richter is regarded as one of the most important painters of his generation, synthesizing art history, mass media, politics, sex and contemporary culture into ever-changing pictorial worlds.
The artist maintains that the dichotomy between abstract and figurative painting is a constructed fiction, since the formal problems of color and composition remain constant. This framework for thinking about painting continues to inform the development of Richter’s approach – from his formative years working with Albert Oehlen and exploring the radical history of abstraction – to the past decade when Richter has focused on the human form through dynamic new canvases that balance abstraction and figuration.
Curated by Dr. Nicole Fritz, the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen presents a retrospective of Richter’s works in Germany – in all their facets. Its focus is on the figurative impulse in Daniel Richter’s work and on the question of how over the past three decades, the artist, through his figurative repertoire, has both thematically and stylistically re-addressed the relationship between man, body and society, as well as between internal and external reality.
The exhibition coincides with the launch of ‘Daniel Richter: Paintings Then and Now’, the first chronological monograph on the artist published by Hatje Cantz. To purchase the monograph through our bookshop, please click here.
