Daniel Richter Lonely Old Slogans

Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
Gl. Strandvej 13
3050 Humlebæk, Denmark

The German artist Daniel Richter (b. 1962) is regarded as one of the most important artists of a generation which also includes Scottish Peter Doig (b. 1959) and Danish Tal R (b. 1967). With this mid-career retrospective exhibition Louisiana’s intends to show Richter’s development from the earliest efforts until today.

Daniel Richter arrived on the art scene in the 1990s with a highly expressive abstract formal idiom that evoked associations with his earliest artistic career as a designer of for instance album covers for a number of punk rock bands in Germany of the 1980s. Since the years around the turn of the century, however, Richter has exclusively painted figurative pictures, often described – also by himself – as a kind of new history painting. But they lack any reproduction of the specific historical events; the pictures seek rather to capture a particular contemporary spirit, marked by the death of the great political utopias. 

Richter’s paintings are both thematically and formally related to German Expressionism and painters such as Max Beckmann (1884-1950) and George Grosz (1893-1959), who in the years before World War II painted acerbic, humorous and profoundly socially critical, allegorical pictures. Daniel Richter takes a similar approach to painting, which according to him is always ideologically positioned in relation to the surrounding world.

For more information: https://en.louisiana.dk/exhibition/daniel-richter