Daniel Richter

Photo by Oliver Helbig

Photo by Oliver Helbig

Daniel Richter in his Berlin studio

Albert Oehlen Willem de Kooning Mark Rothko Jean-Michel Basquiat Ross Bleckner Philip Guston Edouard Vuillard Franz Ackermann

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Within a stone’s throw of Daniel Richter’s studio in the funky neighborhood known as Mitte, the Berlin Biennale has laid out an international smorgasbord of artists, curators, dealers and critics. But the scraggly-haired, athletically built Richter—whose giant, cacophonous paintings overflow with exuberant graffiti scrawls, gobs of Day-Glo color and ghoulish references to Goya, Ensor and Munch—is deliberately steering clear of the action. From a window in the Gothic-style former postal-service carriage house where he has lived and worked in relative quiet for 10 years, the artist spots a journalist roaming a dilapidated courtyard and raps lightly on the darkened pane. Moments later he emerges—towering, unshaven—in a blue flannel bathrobe, pajamas and paint-speckled soccer shoes.

Richter, 46, burst onto the already spirited German painting scene in 1995 with his first solo show, at the Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery (CFA), in Berlin, including works such as Love, whose colorful, free-form style evinced a fascination with punk rock and the album covers of R. Crumb and Raymond Pettibon. Four years later, Richter’s abstract squiggles and pinkish tones began to assume the shapes of faces in a crowd as he segued into figuration. But it wasn’t until 2000, when Phienox and Tuanus, also first displayed at CFA, revealed his keen grasp of color and dappled-light effects, that Richter’s meteoric ascent in Germany translated into a quick succession of gallery shows.

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

Richter often uses news photographs as sources for his work, and evidence of his reading preferences—from leaning towers of newspapers and magazines to existential novels—clutters the dining table of his small kitchen adjacent to the studio. He loves talking politics and unselfconsciously spouts provocative opinions. That said, the imagery of his best-known history paintings— friezelike depictions of comic-book superheroes, burlesque dancers, dogs and zombies confronting policemen—defies easy interpretation. The same is true of his more recent portraits of solitary instrumentalists and soldiers, whose fuzzy edges and shadows render guitars and guns interchangeable. “One minute, you have the melancholic blues folk musician, the heroic poor guy,” he says. “The next, you have the lost soul of a soldier entering a vast enemy area.” Presented from the rear, the figures in this series are stooped, abject, like prisoners awaiting their own execution but, says Richter, only half accepting their fate.

With its 30-foot ceilings and persistent damp chill, Richter’s studio has the feel of a giant garage, and in fact, the building was an auto body shop after it was abandoned by the post office. Overlapping Persian carpets do little to warm things up. A series of dark rooms off his studio reveals an unmade bed and shelves cluttered with books and records. It’s as if his real life exists elsewhere— which in some ways it does. After working in monk-like seclusion for two- to three-week periods, he joins his wife, Angela, a theater director, and their toddler son at their home in Hamburg for 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 length and 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 painting in progress hanging from the smaller of the two panels. Like a witness to Richter’s many contradictions, the picture features neither guitar hero nor soldier but a burning hand suspended before a horrified man in a blue suit and a frieze of fluorescent skeletons.

Richter, who never uses assistants, says that his paintings can take from two months to two years to complete. He began this one, Im Birkengrund, more than a year ago. “I’ve always been fascinated by the almighty power of the hand that writes down history,” he says, explaining that the work—based on a scene from the Old Testament in which King Belshazzar of Babylon is visited by an omen that he ignores—critiques the blurring of fact and fiction in today’s news media. It also gives a lighthearted nod to Thing in Charles Addams’s cartoons.

Richter’s knowledge of art history borders on the encyclopedic, and he readily admits to cannibalizing the work of painters from Vuillard to Dix, as well as of more recent artists, such as Ross Bleckner and Richter’s friend and mentor the German painter Albert Oehlen. From Oehlen, whom he once assisted, he pilfered a penchant for witty titles. From Bleckner, he lifted glowing light. And perhaps most important, he updated the style of American graffiti artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and made it German by establishing a connection between graffiti and the now-defunct Berlin Wall in paintings such as Phienox.

His recent focus on solitary figures presents 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 a teacher. His father had already committed what the artist calls “the classic act of sleeping with his secretary,” abandoning the family when Richter was a teenager, never to see his son again. Richter moved to Hamburg when he was 17 and fell in with a group of “do-it-yourself punk-rock lefty squatters.” He collected LPs and comic books. And he drew. In the early ’80s, when hardcore punk bands toured Germany, Richter’s considerable skills as a draftsman came to the attention of local impresarios. Before long he was earning a living designing concert posters, T-shirts, and album covers.

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

“I was not disappointed or angry,” recalls Richter, explaining that “as a student, I was very insecure and not taking myself seriously.” Back in Hamburg, he came to the conclusion that the Berlin show, which contained mainly Minimalist and Conceptual work, “was really lame and boring. … I thought of Abstract Expressionism as a real promise of freedom and unlimited lawlessness.” Several months later, convinced that the final word on abstraction had yet to be spoken, he invited Hackert and Brunnet to Hamburg to witness his painted response.

In the heyday of Conceptualism, Hackert recalls, when the overriding aesthetic was “less is more,” Richter’s claim of resolving some crisis in abstract painting sounded bombastic. Then the artist showed the partners six paintings whose opulent, smeary and graffiti-strewn surfaces completely won them over. Richter’s first solo show with them, in 1995, was a commercial success, but it wasn’t until Richter began to paint figuratively that demand for his pictures skyrocketed.

The New York collector Michael Hort, for example, recalls liking, but not buying, Richter’s abstract paintings when he and his wife, Susan, first saw them at art fairs in the 1990s. Then, during Art Forum Berlin in 2000, they visited cfa, where they were confronted by Zurberes, a painting of an arcade featuring a performing monkey, which they immediately purchased. The couple have since added two major Richter paintings and a dozen drawings to their collection. When they started amassing his work, a large-scale painting was valued at $25,000; today a picture of the same size sells for $375,000, according to Hackert.

The Museum of Modern Art trustee David Teiger, also from New York, bought his first major Richter in 2003. Teiger, who began collecting Philip Guston, de Kooning and Rothko in 1956 and who now owns two Richters, describes the German artist’s formally astute, history-laden paintings as “anarchistic and antiregime” and the artist himself as “in a constant battle with art history [in which] he doesn’t give up.”

With so many galleries, collectors and museums clamoring for Richter’s artwork, his claim that a major highlight of his career occurred during a quiet moment in his studio is perhaps surprising. It came in 2002, when Pettibon—known for his disturbing send-ups of comic book drawings and whom Richter calls “one of the artists I adore most in America”—paid a visit. The two, sitting at the cluttered dining table, collaborated on a photocollage to commemorate the one-year anniversary of 9/11. Comparing Pettibon’s art making to skateboarding or playing the guitar, Richter says, “You don’t need a studio with 60 guys polishing your sculpture. You don’t need all these guys blowing glass. My respect goes to someone like Pettibon, who can say something serious 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 a snapshot 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 .