“The essentially interesting thing about non-representative painting is the idea of radicality and freedom.”
—Daniel Richter

Frenetic and fantastical, electrified by colour and movement, Death of the Esoteric Painter​ demonstrates the ever inventive, bold approach of Daniel Richter. Working on the scale of history painting with dynamic, loose lines of oil paint, Richter embraces the freedom of non-representation to render his psychedelic, saturated dreamscapes that define his oeuvre from the turn of the twenty-first century.

 

Approaching the figure without rigid pictorial codes, alternating between abstraction and figuration, Richter’s practice has its roots in Hamburg’s underground punk scene of the late '80s and '90s where he started off designing posters, flyers, and record sleeves for local bands, an early introduction to the irreverent, rebellious spirit that still characterises his approach to painting. Commencing his formal art education in his thirties, Richter worked with Albert Oehlen and other enfant terribles of the German art scene including his professor at Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts, Werner Büttner. Known for their novel and decidedly provocative modes of expression, the lawlessness of the ‘Hetzler boys’ would prove decisive in guiding Richter’s own critical and deconstructive approach to the traditions of painting.

 

Rich in shocking, expressive colour, in Death of the Esoteric Painter Richter borrows from the language of history painting and Biblical allegory to subvert the grand narratives that they support. Transformed into radically simplified and phosphorescent forms, the two protagonists are locked in a fiery battle, the ‘esoteric painter’ of the title seen clutching a palette and brush, staring up in open-mouthed horror as the second figure prepares to strike his deathblow. Drawing on the popular trope of the lone artist-warrior sent to battle dark and dangerous forces that formed such a central role in German Romanticism’s investigations into the Sublime, Richter playfully stages the existential struggles of the painter. Just as Edvard Munch had employed expressive colour and tortured lines to communicate a universal alienation and horror in his most iconic compositions, Richter combines the energy of neo-expressionism with these stylistic elements to magnify sensation. Playing with spatial perception, layers of cadmium orange, electric blue, and phosphorescent green fluoresce from the canvas, as if alight. Recalling the technical lines of cartographic drawings and tones of thermal imaging, it seems for Richter the ‘death’ of esoteric painting marks the eradication of the sublime landscape, and what, he seems to ask, might rise from its ashes.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Heir to the achievements of the ‘Junge Wilde’ and among the forefront of German painters living today, Daniel Richter was born in 1962 in Eutin, a town in Northern Germany. Currently living and working in Berlin, technology, mass media, popular culture and politics each inform Richter’s monumental, luminous worlds.

• The subject of significant institutional exhibitions internationally, Richter’s acclaimed mid-career retrospective at the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek travelled to 21er Haus, Vienna and the Camden Arts Centre (2016-2017). Since his solo presentation in 2022 at the Ateneo Veneto in conjunction with the 59^th Venice Biennale, Richter’s major solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen closed last year in October 2023.

• Richter’s works are held in celebrated museum collections worldwide including, among many others, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.