Daniel Richter is Dropping Some Funky Dimes

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that nobody would, in a million years, guess who made this first painting (that first below, that is). Not that it’s radically different from anything done before, but it’s just not exemplary, particularly for an artist of Daniel Richter’s caliber. Yet, he painted this gem and included it in his current sixth solo show, Funky Dimes, with GRIMM Gallery in Amsterdam, an exhibition that exposes not only the diversity of the German painter’s imagery, but the loose, intuitive, and ever-flowing nature of his practice. Fittingly, this presentation is the last one at  GRIMM’s space before moving to the new location in a couple of months.

Richter has been prolific and in the spotlight for so many years that I feel different generations of art appreciators identify with different bodies of work. For me, it’s the gestural, vibrant colors and half-abstract/half-figurative works from the last decade that feel most iconic. I know that the conversation about abstraction and figuration is an unpopular one, but the cold fact is that Richter began by testing the borders of abstraction’s decorative value, before shifting to figuration, which was to some degree influenced by his graphic work from earlier days of making punk album covers, zines, flyers, etc. This body of work was often based on existing photographs, which he would transform into unmistakable paintings filled with tension, irony, violence, and wrapped with ambiguity. And one of the most prominent qualities of these works was the transformation of the original photographs into infrared thermographic imagery.

With this approach, Richter ticked a couple of important boxes for his work. It removed the documentary truth of repainting a photograph, heightening its atmosphere beyond the limits of reality. Instead of observing a documentation of an event, the viewer is placed in an intense witness or surveillance role, where uncomfortable emotions begin to kick in. At the same time, this was a perfect “excuse” to mess with the formal elements of the painting, particularly the use of colors and their application. In that regard, the figures become masses of glowing energy, occasionally reduced to a stamp-like shape that looks as if someone had crumpled Rothko’s color fields into a human-figure silhouette. And these, in some ways, morphed into the bold, line- and color-dominated compressed figures he’s been exploring since 2015-ish.  

And while these series existed pretty much separately (in the viewer's mind), Funky Dimes brings them all together in two rooms of Amsterdam’s gallery (showing that they always coexisted for Richter). Occasionally seen side by side at his institutional retrospective-like exhibitions, this presentation fuses them through all-new works that occasionally revisit the older visuals. He places the vibrant gestures of recent years into the backgrounds of his dense, cinematic 'history paintings,' drops ghostly silhouettes into more developed scenery, and multiplies the figures within his bold, line-dominated pieces. In doing so, he accentuates the congruence of disparate images or narratives that he's been focused on for decades. Parties and riots, punks and swat units, cowboys and taliban, heroes and villains, sex and violence, all of it gets flattened through a great equalizer of painting into new, familiar, often violent but car-crash-captivating scenes. —Saša Bogojev