Daniel Richter beschlossene Feindschaft, 2023

Daniel Richter reasserts his ever-inventive approach to depicting the human body, portraying biomorphic forms in a series of twisting poses informed by the artist’s observations of the world around him. Since 2015, Richter has broken down compositional distinctions between background, foreground and subject to create renditions of the body in metamorphosis.

Part of his most recent series of paintings, beschlossene Feindschaft (2023) continues his stylistic experimentation. He depicts two figures against a grey background that is then almost entirely covered by bright red paint, isolating the bodies within a sea of vibrant colour and reversing the painting process by laying down the ‘background’ as one of the final stages of the work. Endlessly seeking new approaches to painting, Richter notes, ‘I think it’s good to change. I had milked the cow, now I am riding the pig.’

Embodying this investigative approach to artmaking, this work is as much an experiment in colour, line and technique as a figurative study, carving out a distinct place within the artist’s wider oeuvre and the landscape of contemporary painting itself. Eva Meyer-Hermann, art historian and author of the major 2023 monograph Daniel Richter: Paintings Then and Now, writes of his paintings: ‘They are not an expression of world affairs but rather embody (in the truest sense of the word) the contradictions of the world in a larger continuum.’