Lot 68
  • 68

Daniel Richter

Estimate
350,000 - 450,000 USD
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Description

  • Daniel Richter
  • Those Who Are Here Again
  • signed and dated 2002
  • oil and lacquer on canvas
  • 116 x 133 1/2 in. 295 x 339 cm

Provenance

Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

Exhibited

Dusseldorf, K21 Kunstsammlung NRW, Daniel Richter: Grünspan, October 2002 - January 2003

Catalogue Note

Brimming with an intense, hallucinatory atmosphere, Those Who Are Here Again is one of Daniel Richter’s largest and most striking works. Executed on an epic scale, here we witness an almost post-apocalyptic gathering in the dead of night, viewed through an abstracted lens that refracts the scene in a kaleidoscope of color. Like an alchemist Richter combines oil paint and lacquer, adding an element of chance as pigments run freely to create a scene which is delicately perched between figuration and abstraction. A group of vagabond figures hunch around a bonfire suggesting a narrative, yet one without any straightforward interpretation, accentuated by the multicolored specks of paint that suggest glowing embers from the fire, fire-flies, stars, or perhaps just that: splashes of paint. The multi-layered landscape adds to the confusion as it disappears into the distance and the figures carry on this sense of contrast as simplified clown-like faces are drawn on their otherwise naturalistic bodies. In the foreground a howling dog rivals a similarly screaming creature appearing through the window in the upper left hand corner.

Richter’s point of departure is the tradition of 19th-Century History Paintings, however in his hands these dramatic paintings of religious and mythological events of the past wittily decompose into visions of dysfunctional youth in the distant future.  His motifs, usually referenced from mundane sources such as media, comic books and found photographs, convey none of the moral imperatives of the 19th-Century genre. These are tempered with a spirit of experimentation and enquiry, both through Richter’s deft handling of paint as well as a certain oddness that creeps into his works as traditional genres of painting are given unexpected twists. Here passages of highly descriptive painting, like in the window and objects around the bonfire, are mixed with veils of abstracted color which describe the trees and the almost cartoonesque plume of smoke which emerges from the bonfire.

Richter spent most of the 1980s designing posters and record covers for punk bands, and this stylistic influence is infused into the chromatic intensity of Those Who Are Here Again. Using almost neon luminosity, Richter moves further away from the 'brown-ness' of 19th-Century painting into a unique system of color relationships in which stark contrasts create a charged atmosphere. The acidic yellow trees and fluorescent red figures burn through the canvas like an after-glow. The title, Those Who Are Here Again, hints at something ritual although it could refer to broader upheavals in the cycles of history. A never-ending party suddenly hints at something much more ominous. Thus, a painting whose brash idealism glows from its first glimpse suddenly hints at a dark, inauspicious future.