Daniel Richter

Daniel Richter was in New York while he worked on the series ‘Ohne Titel’ (Untitled, 2007–9): oil sketches on paper depicting turbaned figures in a rugged, mountainous terrain. The exhibition ‘10001nacht’ (10001night) united these sparse, often haunting works with 20 large-scale and five smaller oil paintings from 2010–11; the artist revives the turban motif but populates it with his familiar life-size male figures engaged in mysterious, perhaps threatening activities. The concentration on one iconographic theme installed in tight, apparently chromatic groups on the two levels of the exhibition space makes for a forceful show: intensely coloured, densely layered images in the lower level; airy, planar views with small figures in the light-flooded, domed upstairs space.

Ten years after 9/11 and months after Osama Bin Laden’s death, turbaned figures tend to be viewed as iconic references to the Taliban, the Afghan war and the Global War on Terror. Richter plays with many associations, which are unpacked in the catalogue’s essays and enriched by the exhibition title’s nod to the Arabic tales One Thousand and One Nights (c.1200). Bellicose associations are also manifest in the paintings – so many takes on war reportage, computer games, hi-tech surveillance, among others – and in certain titles. O.O.A. (out of angenehm) (out of comfortable, 2011) sounds like a military abbreviation while WOW (2011) might refer to the online game World of Warcraft.

While relying on our familiarity with wartime imagery, Richter transcends the events of recent years and cites conventions of the sublime, tropes of Romantic landscape painting as well as kitschy postcards, cigarette ads and cheesy book covers which have indelibly imprinted our imaginary landscapes with lonely heroic figures. The paintings constitute an effort to investigate the iconicity of these figures while consistently undercutting notions of pathos.

For example, small throwaway figures giving blowjobs or urinating from a cliff smother the potential for pathos with an intentional bathos typical of the ‘bad painting’ to which the artist’s work is indebted. ‘Have you looked at that one closely,’ snickered an old man as I walked by one painting, lest I missed the wolf pissing on an alpinist about to plunge into an abyss in Es liegt aber, sagte der Wolf, nicht in meiner Natur Dir zu helfen (It is however, said the wolf, not in my nature to help you, 2011). Such token parodistic gestures are by now standard mechanisms for holding at bay the anxiety that painting still seems to evoke.

Richter continues to employ an apparently off-hand application of paint: pouring, dripping, smearing, doodling, spray-painting and impasto. But the accidental has become 
a trope and a technique the artist uses knowingly, if not teasingly. The lack of skill the painter used to brag about has given way to an elaborate display of painting techniques and an assured handling of both colour and composition. In O.O.A. (out of angenehm) 
(out of comfortable), ghostly warriors fuse with brightly coloured patches of landscape created from flickering lines that might describe sedimentary layers of rock. The surface – on which the paint appears to have been dripped, poured and flicked in different directions – adds to the sense of movement in the running or fighting figures.

Richter’s signature ‘thermal imaging’ of human 
figures is reversed here; the landscape appears in bright neon colours while the figures are blurry jet-black outlines, except 
for the hands and the coloured discs that serve as eyes. At the right lower corner 
a hybrid form, a cross between mountain 
and swamp creature, reinforces the feeling 
of an adolescent image world suspended between the cool and the gross.

Richter has always balanced his focus on the playful and excessive process of painting with his insistence on painting as a conceptual tool for seeking a solution to a specific (social, moral, ethical) problem. His references to our image world invite us to follow his thought process. But if this accessibility makes the pictures pleasurable, it also makes them, ultimately, didactic, in a positive sense. Richter’s oft-stated wish for art to have social relevance might just be coming true.