DANIEL RICHTER | Jeans

Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Acquired from the above by David Teiger in 2003

Toronto, The Power Plant; Vancouver, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia; Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Daniel Richter, Pink Flag, White Horse, March 2004 - 2006, pp. 50-51, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the orange and pink pigments are stronger in the original. The illustration fails to fully convey the fluorescence of the pigments. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Jeans is a superb example of Daniel Richter’s signature style, blending abstract colour theory with dramatic images gleaned from contemporaneous news media. A posse of indistinct figures emerge from a background of radioactive green undergrowth, holding barking dogs on tight leashes. Their hooded appearance recalls swat teams and riot police, and their burly poses are overtly threatening, but the situation itself is ambiguous. This is typical of Richter, who regularly pulls his source images from news media, in order to suffuse his work with a sense of apocalyptic doom. He does not focus on a specific conflict or group of victims or perpetrators, but instead plays upon the tropes of war reporting and modern journalism, instilling a sense of sublime untethered fear in his viewers. He shows militia groups and refugees in compositions that are overtly familiar to us from any number of global conflicts and urban catastrophes. This practice stitches a sense of grim reality into his canvases, but also provides a subtle commentary on the global media machine. Likewise, Richter’s treatment of the authoritative male figure seems to simultaneously provoke ridicule and fear. Richter intentionally emphasises the modern cult of masculinity bred by militarism in order to specifically undermine it: “It’s about the erosion of the cliché of manliness… It’s a stupid cliché but it has a certain beauty” (Daniel Richter cited in: Rachel Wolff, ‘Psychedelic Painter Daniel Richter Trades Figuartion for Improvisation in Berlin’, in BlouinArtinfo.com, 30 March 2013, online). Richter’s extraordinary ability to imbue his works with specific mood and distinct character is born from his unusual painterly background. He began his career as an abstract painter, making canvases of high-key saturated colour compositions throughout the 1990s. Indeed, it was only in 2002 – the year of the creation of the present work – that he turned to figuration in earnest. Thus, his early proclivity for colour field painting is still manifest in the execution of Jeans. The interior of each figure is filled with swirling clouds of blooming colour with individual patches glowing bright and hot. The dogs are translucent scarlet, with bright eyes and mouths, and the overall effect recalls night vision or thermal imaging cameras; an association that adds much to the pseudo-military mood. That Richter should choose to focus so much of his energy on matters related to current affairs and contemporary political events reminds us of his history with the punk scene. After he was expelled from school aged seventeen, he moved to Berlin and became deeply ingrained within the city’s leftist Punk movement. He was yet to study painting and wouldn’t do so until he was almost 30, but he quickly became the local music scene’s go-to graphic artist, designing flyers, t-shirts, and album covers for local Punk bands. The suggestion that the aesthetic of the 1980s German Punk movement had a direct impact on Richter’s painting work of the 2000s is probably a stretch too far, however, the attitude of the movement, based in confronting the perceived bigotry and conformity of the establishment, certainly had an impact on his psychological outlook and is manifest in his most important works, much like that of his American contemporary Christopher Wool.

Richter has relied on his immediate forebears of German painting for influence, as well as a handful of figures from art history. He only began training in painting in his late twenties, when he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. He was taught by Werner Buttner, one of Martin Kippenberger’s early collaborators, whose crude yet expressive approach to figuration made a formative impact. Buttner in turn arranged for Richter to work as an assistant to Albert Oehlen in the early 1990s. In Oehlen, Richter found a teacher with an unparalleled technical mastery of paint and a shrewd conceptual brain; the manner in which Oehlen unites abstract compositions of explosive colour with images gleaned from advertising and popular culture is directly comparable to the way that Richter unites his distinct painterly style with images taken from the news media. Art historical influences are also important in Richter’s work, most notably Edvard Munch who not only provided a template for Richter’s fluid modulating style, but also provided a useful precedent for the nightmarish mood that pervades his work.

Jeans perfectly encapsulates the dramatic power that Richter managed to achieve in figurative painting in the months and years immediately following his transition from abstraction. It is a dramatic tableau of impressive size and devastating impact, fusing idiosyncratic palettes of super-saturated colours with a brooding composition of imposing figures.