Daniel Richter Paintings Then and Now

While German painting of the postwar period mostly concerned itself with coming to terms with the past and presenting it in gestures ranging from the heroic to the ironic, Daniel Richter focuses on positioning himself in the present. Time and again he devises new ways of being “modern” in a medium that has long been labeled old-fashioned. His pictures consistently challenge the spectator through their painterly and contextually excessive demands, but they do not lecture on moral issues.

For the first time, Eva Meyer-Hermann traces the chronological development of Richter’s oeuvre across more than 200 examples of his work. The turns from abstraction to figuration and back again that until now have been described as abrupt, prove on closer examination to be a logical consequence and a sign of conscious artistic action.

The catalogue includes contributions by Verena Dengler, Max Hollein, Roberto Ohrt and Cord Riechelmann.