Allegories of anarchy: part of a new wave of German painters, Daniel Richter, who is the subject of a current traveling show, creates large-scale pictures that combine political themes, Felliniesque fantasy and quasi-abstract elements
Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Raphael Rubinstein
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Some of Richter's paintings are overloaded with unlikely characters and weird situations that defy analysis. The large horizontal Nerdon resembles a scene from an experimental theater piece. Against a backdrop of a dilapidated cityscape are an albino gorilla musing in a wheelchair; a red-bearded, wooden-shoed man holding a rabbit and a fish; an enervated figure collapsed against a many-pointed red star that looks like a decorative relic from the Communist era; and a pale, ghostlike figure engaged in some ambiguous intimate act with a kneeling man and a ghoulish brown creature. A crowd of horror-film mutants is visible in the background. Is this an allegory of post-unification Germany? A visualization of a song by some German punk band? Or simply the product of the artist's overheated imagination? If much remains mysterious, it's clear that every inch of this large canvas is enlivened by multifarious brushwork and layering of color, by a canny mixture of perspectival space and picture-plane flatness, and by a painterly practice that is as delirious and operatic as the imagery it conveys.
Just before I made my first visit to Daniel Richter's show at Zwirner, I went to a large de Kooning exhibition a few blocks away at Gagosian Gallery. After looking at dozens of great de Koonings from throughout the artist's career, it felt impossible to see anything else in Chelsea. I walked quickly in and out of a half-dozen galleries, silently lamenting how far painterly ability and ambition had fallen. As I was about to quit for the day, while I still had an unsullied memory of the Dutchman's canvases, I strolled into the Richter show. To my shock, here was a gallery full of paintings that could be looked at in the same breath, as it were, as the de Koonings. Although their genres couldn't have been more different--druggy, allegorical history paintings versus gestural abstractions--both shows shared an elevated conception of painting as an art demanding virtuosic technique and full activation of every canvas. On the subject of de Kooning, Fairfield Porter once wrote of "a picture presented of released possibilities." While so many of his contemporaries (artists and viewers alike) seem satisfied with a conceptually stilted, visually stiff definition of painting, Daniel Richter, in his New York debut, showed himself, too, to be consumed by the "released possibilities" of his chosen medium.
"Daniel Richter: Pink Flag--White Horse" debuted at the Power Plant, Toronto [Mar. 27-May 23], before traveling to the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver [Oct. 8-Dec. 5], and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa [June 25-Sept. 10, 2005]. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with a brief essay by co-curators" Wayne Baerwaldt and Scott Watson. "Daniel Richter: The Morning After" was on view at David Zwirner Gallery, New York [May 10-Jane 19].
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