Daniel Richter

Funky Dimes 

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Daniel Richter’s work synthesizes art history, mass media, politics, and sex into ever-changing pictorial worlds. Richter rose to prominence in the 1990s with dense and brightly-colored abstract paintings recalling his work as an album cover designer for German punk bands in the 1980s. The year 2000 marked a significant stylistic change in Richter’s visual language, with new paintings focusing on figurative imagery drawn from newspapers and historical references rendered atmospheric and mysterious. As Daniel Baird describes, Richter’s work from this time exists in an “unresolveable zone between industrial rave, squatter riot, idle fantasy, global fear, drugged hallucination, and absurdist violence. 1

Since 2015, Richter has focused on painting gestural forms which recall distorted bodies moving and interacting in space. Frequently rendered against flat two-tone backgrounds, limbs are distorted into gesture and bold color, as Richter describes his compositional approach as “control versus improvisation—outbursts of body parts versus abstract elements.”2

1 Daniel Baird, “Daniel Richter,” review of The Morning After, David Zwirner, New York and White Flag - Pink Flag, The Power Plant, Toronto, June 1, 2004, https://brooklynrail.org/2004/06/art/daniel-richter/

2 Toby Kamps, “In Conversation: Daniel Richter with Toby Kamps,” November 1, 2023,

https://brooklynrail.org/2023/11/art/Daniel-Richter-with-Toby-Kamps/

On view in Funky Dimes, Richter’s BROSIS depicts a green, red, and black figure with a mask-like face outlined in black and yellow oil-stick coming into contact with an abstracted form with similar coloring. There is a palpable intensity to the lefthand figure’s expression, as well as the forcible contact of its foot and arm, which dissolve into the figure on the right side of the canvas.

In Darkdays and dogdays, the background tones of rust and light pink give it a similar sense of horizon line, albeit with a greater number of bulbous yellow figures grasping at each other. In the intense interplay of fractured anatomic forms and abstract marks in these new works, Richter defines physical connection as enigmatic, ghostly, orgiastic, and violent.

As a counterpoint to these two large-scale pieces, Funky Dimes will also feature six new paintings by Richter which reference his surreal and figurative ‘history paintings’ from the early to mid-2000s. Three of these works depict shadowy figures in hazy and surreal landscapes, whereas the other works, including Pandorian paintings revisited, allude to battle and political upheaval in urban settings. In both bodies of work, Richter continues his decades-long fascination with deconstructing the supposed distinctions between abstraction and figuration via the dynamic interaction of gesture, color, and composition.

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