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Within a stone’s throw of Daniel Richters studio in the funkyneighborhood known as Mitte, the Berlin Biennale has laidout an international smorgasbord of artists, curators, dealersand critics. But the scraggly-haired, athletically built Richter—whose giant,cacophonous paintings overflow with exuberant graffiti scrawls, gobs ofDay-Glo color and ghoulish references to Goya, Ensor and Munchisdeliberately steering clear of the action. From a window in the Gothic-styleformer postal-service carriage house where he has lived and workedin relative quiet for 10 years, the artist spots a journalist roaming a dilapidatedcourtyard and raps lightly on the darkened pane. Moments later heemerges—towering, unshaven—in ablue flannel bathrobe, pajamas andpaint-speckled soccer shoes.

Richter, 46, burst onto thealready spirited German paintingscene in 1995 with his first solo show,at the Contemporary Fine ArtsGallery (CFA), in Berlin, includingworks such as Love, whose colorful, free-form style evinced a fascination with punk rock and thealbum covers of R. Crumb and Raymond Pettibon. Four years later,Richter’s abstract squiggles and pinkish tones began to assumethe shapes of faces in a crowd as he segued into figuration. But itwasn’t until 2000, when Phienox and Tuanus, also first displayedat CFA, revealed his keen grasp of color and dappled-light effects,that Richter’s meteoric ascent in Germany translated into a quicksuccession of gallery shows.

Enthusiasm for his work continues to grow. A sold-outshow of Richter’s most recent paintings and drawings atLos Angeles’s Regen Projects this past February was followeda month later by an exhibition of new work, also sold out, atDavid Zwirner Gallery, in New York. This month, “Daniel Richter:A Major Survey” opens at Denver Art Museum, ending a tourthat began in Hamburg and included stops in the Hague andMálaga, Spain. The midcareer retrospective, which includes 25 large-scalepaintings and nearly 40 smaller works from 1994 to thepresent, will finally give the artist broad institutional exposurein the United States. Organized by Denver’s recently appointedcurator of modern and contemporary art, Christoph Heinrich, theexhibition rides a wave of international interest in contemporaryGerman painters, among them Neo Rauch, Franz Ackermann,Thomas Scheibitz and now Richter.

Richter often uses news photographs as sources for hiswork, and evidence of his reading preferences—from leaningtowers of newspapers and magazines to existential novels—cluttersthe dining table of his small kitchen adjacent to the studio. Heloves talking politics and unselfconsciously spouts provocativeopinions. That said, the imagery of his best-known history paintings—friezelike depictions of comic-booksuperheroes, burlesque dancers, dogs andzombies confronting policemen—defieseasy interpretation. The same is true of hismore recent portraits of solitary instrumentalists and soldiers,whose fuzzy edges and shadows render guitars and guns interchangeable.“One minute, you have the melancholic blues folkmusician, the heroic poor guy,” he says. “The next, you havethe lost soul of a soldier entering a vast enemy area.” Presentedfrom the rear, the figures in this series are stooped, abject, likeprisoners awaiting their own execution but, says Richter, only halfaccepting their fate.

With its 30-foot ceilings and persistent damp chill, Richter’sstudio has the feel of a giant garage, and in fact, the building wasan auto body shop after it was abandoned by the post office.Overlapping Persian carpets do little to warm things up. A seriesof dark rooms off his studio reveals an unmade bed and shelvescluttered with books and records. It’s as if his real life exists elsewhere—which in some ways it does. After working in monk-likeseclusion for two- to three-week periods, he joins his wife, Angela,a theater director, and their toddler son at their home in Hamburgfor several days—or weeks—of rest. After this much-needed domesticity,he returns to Berlin to start the cycle all over.

Two enormous whitewashed wooden panels run the lengthand width of the cavernous space. In the room’s center, a single,swiveling office chair, its seat padded with a thick wool blanket,offers the perfect vantage from which to view an enormous paintingin progress hanging from the smaller of the two panels. Like awitness to Richter’s many contradictions, the picture features neitherguitar hero nor soldier but a burning hand suspended before ahorrified man in a blue suit and a frieze of fluorescent skeletons.

Richter, who never uses assistants, says that his paintingscan take from two months to two years to complete. He beganthis one, Im Birkengrund, more than a year ago. “I’ve always beenfascinated by the almighty power of the hand that writes downhistory,” he says, explaining that the work—based on a scenefrom the Old Testament in which King Belshazzar of Babylonis visited by an omen that he ignores—critiques the blurringof fact and fiction in today’s news media. It also gives a lightheartednod to Thing in Charles Addamss cartoons.

Richter’s knowledge of art history borders on the encyclopedic,and he readily admits to cannibalizing the work of paintersfrom Vuillard to Dix, as well as of more recent artists, such as RossBleckner and Richter’s friend and mentor the German painterAlbert Oehlen. From Oehlen, whom he once assisted, he pilfereda penchant for witty titles. From Bleckner,he lifted glowing light. And perhaps mostimportant, he updated the style of Americangraffiti artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat andmade it German by establishing a connectionbetween graffiti and the now-defunctBerlin Wall in paintings such as Phienox.

His recent focus on solitary figurespresents yet another cannibalization—of his past. Born in 1962 in a small village outside Hamburg,Richter was kicked out of high school after throwing a chair at ateacher. His father had already committed what the artist calls “theclassic act of sleeping with his secretary,” abandoning the familywhen Richter was a teenager, never to see his son again. Richtermoved to Hamburg when he was 17 and fell in with a group of “do-it-yourself punk-rock lefty squatters.” He collected LPs and comicbooks. And he drew. In the early ’80s, when hardcore punk bandstoured Germany, Richter’s considerable skills as a draftsman cameto the attention of local impresarios. Before long he was earning aliving designing concert posters, T-shirts, and album covers.

That life came to an end in 1989, when the Berlin Wall felland punk was subsumed into the larger music industry. “I hadto decide what to do with my life,” Richter says. In 1992 theartist, at age 30, enrolled in Hamburg’s Collegeof Fine Arts. Two years later, while still a student,he was invited by Nicole Hackert and BrunoBrunnet, the cofounders of CFA, to participate ina group show. Unhappy with Richter’s submission,however, they withdrew their offer.

“I was not disappointed or angry,” recalls Richter, explainingthat “as a student, I was very insecure and not taking myselfseriously.” Back in Hamburg, he came to the conclusion that theBerlin show, which contained mainly Minimalist and Conceptualwork, “was really lame and boring. … I thought of AbstractExpressionism as a real promise of freedom and unlimited lawlessness.”Several months later, convinced that the final word onabstraction had yet to be spoken, he invited Hackert and Brunnetto Hamburg to witness his painted response.

In the heyday of Conceptualism, Hackert recalls, when theoverriding aesthetic was “less is more,” Richter’s claim of resolvingsome crisis in abstract painting sounded bombastic. Then theartist showed the partners six paintings whose opulent, smearyand graffiti-strewn surfaces completely won them over. Richter’sfirst solo show with them, in 1995, was a commercial success, butit wasn’t until Richter began to paint figuratively that demand forhis pictures skyrocketed.

The New York collector Michael Hort, for example, recallsliking, but not buying, Richter’s abstract paintings when he andhis wife, Susan, first saw them at art fairs in the 1990s. Then, duringArt Forum Berlin in 2000, they visited cfa, where they were confrontedby Zurberes, a painting of an arcade featuring a performingmonkey, which they immediately purchased. The couple havesince added two major Richter paintings and a dozen drawingsto their collection. When they started amassing his work, a large-scalepainting was valued at $25,000; today a picture of the samesize sells for $375,000, according to Hackert.

The Museum of Modern Art trustee David Teiger, alsofrom New York, bought his first major Richter in 2003. Teiger,who began collecting Philip Guston, de Kooning and Rothko in1956 and who now owns two Richters,describes the German artist’s formallyastute, history-laden paintings as “anarchisticand antiregime” and the artist himself as “in a constantbattle with art history [in which] he doesn’t give up.”

With so many galleries, collectors and museums clamoringfor Richter’s artwork, his claim that a major highlight of hiscareer occurred during a quiet moment in his studio is perhapssurprising. It came in 2002, when Pettibonknown for his disturbingsend-ups of comic book drawings and whom Richtercalls “one of the artists I adore most in America”—paid a visit.The two, sitting at the cluttered dining table, collaborated on aphotocollage to commemorate the one-year anniversary of 9/11.Comparing Pettibon’s art making to skateboarding or playing theguitar, Richter says, “You don’t need a studio with 60 guys polishingyour sculpture. You don’t need all these guys blowing glass.My respect goes to someone like Pettibon, who can say somethingserious with just a pencil.

“It was one of the rare good collaborations,” he adds, laughing.Then, like a kid with a prized baseball card, he whips out asnapshot of Pettibon drawing at his kitchen table to prove it.

"In The Studio with Daniel Richter" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2008 Table of Contents .