Lot 629
  • 629

Daniel Richter

Estimate
1,500,000 - 2,400,000 HKD
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Description

  • Daniel Richter
  • OOA2
  • oil on canvas
signed, titled and dated 2011 on the reverse, framed

Provenance

Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Exhibited

Los Angeles, Regen Projects, A Concert of Purpose and Actions, January - February 2012

Condition

This work is in good condition overall. There are a few scattered black areas which exhibit stable minor hairline surface craquelure, consistent with the artist's choice of medium, primarily in the lower right quadrant of the work and an area 70 cm from the bottom and 80 cm from the left edges of the work. Under extremely close inspection, there is one small white mark 105 cm from the left along the top edge, one 115 cm from the left along the bottom edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra violet light. Framed.
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Catalogue Note

A mysterious, gun wielding figure covered in black, hustles through a nightmarish backdrop. His ghastly eyes, glowing in the dark under a mask, form stark contrast with the explosive surroundings and dazzling lighting. An emblematic image of catastrophe, Daniel Richter’s bold, colour intensive OOA2 (Lot 629) simultaneously explores the boundaries of social order and the backslash of anarchic disorder. His works often reference war and historical events, but nevertheless convey current political tensions with an energetic punk rock approach.

Richter’s psychedelic scenes provoke fear and anxiety through the juxtaposition of contrasting notions: fear and joy, evil and good, menace and security. The recurring theme of violence and war in particular dominates Richter’s work. In the artist’s striking and vibrant compositions, he alludes to raw human nature and feeble political establishments. Both splendid and terrifying, human nature can drastically change from love to hate, from compassion to greed depending on environment and circumstances. The same goes for political establishments, which can retain control for hundreds of years or be overthrown overnight. Richter not only encapsulates the fragility of civilization through the disorder of individuals, he also blends in ongoing political trends with historical events. A picture could either be a flashback from World War II, or an ongoing military conflict in the Middle East broadcasted on television. The hallucinatory appearance of Richter’s ambiguous figures reproduces a reality where spectators are involved in his work—this scene could have been recent front-page news unfolding right in front of our eyes. With no immediate identifiable elements, the ambiguity of the scenery urges spectators to reconsider the role of history in relation with contemporary events and our everyday life.

In the past decade, Richter’s paintings have often scrutinised the potential aftermath of an apocalypse. Featuring Western cities in the hypothetical event of existential destruction, Richter’s works warn us of the consequence of the unfathomable doomsday. The dystopian depiction of a fallen society, characterized by squalor, oppression, and maladies, draws immediate comparison with the atmosphere emanating from OOA2. Typical of Richter’s large scale tableaux, the landscape within which the sprinting figure is set against appears mountainous and turbulent, evoked by the graffiti-like lines that strike like thunder and crawl like pulsating veins over the vast expanse of abstract fluorescent chaos. Its composition echoes another painting by Richter titled O.O.A. (out of angenehm) (out of comfortable) painted in the same year, in which a silhouetted figure runs in opposite direction to the militant figure in our current work. Perhaps the lone mysterious figure in OOA2 represents the arrival of hostile artificial intelligence that spells the end of the human race, a current topic frequently debated. In the apocalyptic world where governance lacks and anarchy thrives, there would be no social order or justice. In fact, political stability in our society is constantly under threat, not only from war, but also from civil unrest and natural disaster. Potential anthropogenic threats, such as overpopulation, global warming, or nuclear war would cripple or destroy modern civilisation as we know it. Therefore, it is not difficult for spectators to comprehend Richter’s OOA2 as a haunting prophetic imagery unveiling their eminent future, as Anders Kold succinctly described the artist’s paintings, ‘Nothing really happens in this uncanny mix of beauty and terror, and that being so, it makes the work an immediately identifiable texture woven of the unbroken thread of inexplicable violence, paranoia and often inappropriate heroism that runs through Richter’s work.” (‘Itzi Bitzi’, 10001nacht, Snoeck, Colone 2011, p. 74)

Born in Eutin in northern Germany in 1962, Richter was influenced by the autonomous left-wing punk scene in Hamburg in his youth. Richter was a student of Werner Büttner at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts and later the studio assistant of the German artist Albert Oehlen. His artistic style then evolved from wild abstractions in his early career to politically based representational imagery. His style of painting changed abruptly in 2002 when he was inspired by newspapers to produce large scale figurative scenes that fused history and modernity. Inevitably a politically motivated painter, Richter’s theatrical, pictorial language has garnished a new form of history painting. Instead of capturing a specific historical event, his paintings grasp the atmosphere in contemporary history inspired by mass media. In his most recent works, the artist has successfully coalesced violence and beauty in excessive aggression and vitality.

Richter’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including the artist’s most recent show at Regen Projects, Los Angeles in 2016 and Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover in 2011. In a recent exhibition entitled Le Freak at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, Richter has flirted with erotic corporeality and human figure. The works were so psychologically charged that they bear reminiscence of Francis Bacon’s convoluted and grotesque figurative subjects. He received the prestigious Otto Dix award in 1998, the Preis der Nationalgalerie by Hamburger Bahnhof in 2002, and one of Europe’s most valuable art prizes Kunstpreis Finkenwerder in 2009. Richter’s works are part of renowned collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Boros Collection in Berlin.