Galerie im Taxispalais

Daniel Richter

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The Galerie im Taxispalais is showing the first survey exhibition in Austria of work by painter Daniel Richter (*1962 in Eutin), who is one of the most important German artists of his generation. Richter's work not only reflects the fundamental change that painting as a medium has gone through; his paintings are also remarkable for their sensually and intellectually associative, intertwined interpretations and analyses of art and society. This show presents Daniel Richter's creative production since the turn of the millennium and so concentrates on his figurative works. Among the 23 paintings selected in close cooperation with the artist are key works from the past 14 years as well as new pieces being shown here for the first time. On the basis of significant milestones in his artistic development, the exhibition ranges from Richter's first figurative paintings to the present day and so visualises his thematic and stylistic progress.

Daniel Richter's early works from the 1990s – abstract-ornamental compositions in mainly garish colours – are characterised by an intense debate with formal issues of painting. Around the year 2000 he turned to figurative painting with reference to socio-political realities. He takes up media images and components of popular culture, as well as reverting to motifs of art history to create the narrative worlds in his often large-format works. Richter's most recent paintings, which he has been producing since 2012, represent a further turning point in his oeuvre with respect to painting method as well as content. In earlier paintings he often clarified his debate with social structures in dramatic mass scenes, but in the latest works his interest has shifted towards the depiction of individual characters and their psychological states. Here, he also lends expression to an atmosphere of fear and disquiet in contemporary life.

Daniel Richter, who has been a professor at the Chair of Expanded Pictorial Space at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna since 2006, lives and works in Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna. He studied with Werner Büttner at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg from 1991 to 1995 and worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. He has had numerous successful solo exhibitions, e.g. in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg near Vienna, and Denver Art Museum. Works by Daniel Richter can be found, among other places, in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as in the Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg and the Boros Collection in Berlin.