Daniel Richter with Toby Kamps Art | In Conversation

BY TOBY KAMPS

Daniel Richter (b. 1962, Eutin, Germany) came of age in Hamburg in the 1980s, when that city’s punk and squatter scenes provided DIY spaces for artists and proposed positive alternatives to the time’s go-go 1980s mercantilism. The reunification of Germany and the triumph of global capitalism sparked an existential crisis for Richter, eventually leading him to become a painter as a means to examine his place and time. He began as a student of Werner Büttner at Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts and later worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. Popular culture, art history, and everyday scenes are all inspirations for Richter. Always evolving, his style and themes veer between abstraction and figuration, psychedelia, and history painting. Although he studies the work of other artists closely, he prefers not to overthink his own. Richter’s process is loose and improvisatory. He works out compositions in the act of making them. Self-doubt and an irreverent spirit of play fuel his haunting, humorous images.

Toby Kamps (Rail): You’ve got an exhibition of new paintings entitled Stupor at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in London. What is in your images and how did you get that title?

Daniel Richter: Over the last two or three years, I made paintings inspired by an old postcard photo of two German soldiers on crutches. They had each lost a leg. It’s from a place called Haparanda in Finland. I think those two were captured on the Russian-Finish front during the First World War. Most intellectuals, most artists, were cheering the Kaiser for entering the war. But we all know the result: these two sad guys lost their legs. That observation is not so interesting. What’s more interesting is the image, which was sad and humbling and set in a snowy landscape. They looked like weird insects.

Rail: Because their backs are hunched as they limp along?

Richter: Yes, or some weird architectural figure. I used that as a starting point for themes and variations in painting using double-block background colors. But at some point it got boring. So I decided to get rid of all dramatic content and just started doing huge drawings on canvas, which were more based on everyday observations, like going to the dentist or something. Then I transformed them into something that I thought would be more dramatic or expressive. I’m still in the process of working on it, so I have not enough distance to put the entire process into words. But what I do is very simple. The new images all have red backgrounds with figures on them. They form kind of a block. The working order is reductive and very limited: I do drawings, which become painted figures. Afterward, I fill the remaining space with red. You could say that the background is the foreground.

Rail: These paintings strike me as anything but banal. Their figures, which consist of spirals and circles of black paint enclosing areas of bright color, seem filled with coiled energy, as if they were made of springs that could launch some kind of monstrous force. And the red backgrounds give them a hot energy.

Richter: I have to admit that I think you find better words to describe than I do. While you’re doing something it’s not so easy to grasp the concept. I think the drama comes from the way they are made. Maybe the energy in the figures is suppressed by the red. I don’t know. It’s easier for me to analyze stuff when it’s done. But I’m happy to hear description, because I think that’s the whole paradox. There’s an antagonism between the stress in the figures and the freaky control element of the red, a color which functions on one hand as a warning sign, and on the other seems to control them.

Rail: I thought of the monsters in Goya’s series "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" and their uncanny, from-the-imagination quality.

Richter: Maybe Walt Disney.

Rail: Let’s put Stupor in the context of your career, which began around 1995 with your first exhibition. Since the beginning, you’ve moved between abstraction and figuration. You started with nonrepresentational compositions mixing wide varieties of marks, often in bright colors, that had a psychedelic effect and often included hints of representation. And then you made representational images where lots of weird things happened: figures became translucent, and backgrounds, whether black or multicolored, seethed with energy. Stupor feels like a new amalgamation between these two poles. Talk about this spectrum and where you’ve landed in these works.

Richter: How can I say it? They were based on the desire to leave the limitations of representation behind. For me, it is more satisfying not to know where the painting ends. The more representational work got boring because it’s limited, especially the ones that mocked history painting. They felt like stage sets. They were based on things that existed and that I saw: some suburban area, a school, or Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Public places. But finally it’s like a stage that must have certain elements and meanings. You put figures, of like, whatever, a man beating up another man wearing a uniform, or an elephant drifting by that, I don’t know, has a woman twirling a flag on top. It doesn’t matter. In the end, you find you do not have so much to say. You can use that formula forever, just change whatever you have—a three-legged figure, or a one-legged figure. In the end, its dynamic, its vectors, the whole process of doing it, becomes too predictable, you know?

Rail: You’ve spoken about not wanting to use the same tricks.

Richter: And then I started painting a kind of psychedelic, manly-love, kitschy heroic figure, which offered more freedom. And now, although the images are much more limited, I feel more like I'm in a place where I'm kind of alone. For sure, it's painting, which means, however revolutionary you want to be, you are doomed to be conservative, no matter what your ideas are. It’s like making music. Whatever you do, it's always already coming from somewhere. Maybe you have a little element that's yours. For sure there's a little Asger Jorn in the Stupor paintings in the exploding-from-the-inside aspect of the figures.

Rail: Also the drawing, the black, linear marks demarcating areas of color connects the Stupor works to that CoBrA artist.

Richter: Exactly. It's a mix between drawing and painting. Weirdly, I also thought of Roberto Matta and Wilfredo Lam and their blends of science fiction, expressionism, and social realism, which are kind of forgotten. But my figures don’t float in the utopian spaces of Lam or Matta. They're more suppressed. I think that is why the show is called Stupor. In the beginning, I thought that “Frozen” was going to be the title. I was thinking of the Madonna song. I liked the reference. But then I talked about it with Hanna Putz, my wife, and she said "You're an idiot. Everybody will think of that Disney movie." So then I thought, okay, maybe it's not precise enough because a title opens the door. So Stupor is more precise.

Rail: You're occupying some of the same painterly space as Georg Baselitz, who’s famous for using the figure as a jumping-off point for abstraction. You’ve spoken about him as an influence.

Richter: Yeah, especially in Germany, he talked a lot of bull, like, "women can't paint." But all of my colleagues who are really interested in painting have great respect for Georg Baselitz. He just did something nobody else did. Something very difficult. He made a real step forward in painting, with its extreme limitations. It’s hard to find yourself a little spot, a little dirt hole in the corner, where you think, okay, this is my offering to all the others. I’ve gotten a lot from other painters. I think Baselitz is definitely a very important artist, but I would also mention Philip Guston. On a certain level, historically, you have to admit they were both willing to look foolish. They were not representing the zeitgeist. They did what they did for the sake of finding their own language. In his time, Guston stood out because of his desire to say something. I love his work. I think the non-narrative paintings he made in the fifties and the early sixties are among the most beautiful that have been done in postwar society.

Rail: Agreed.

Richter: They are really touching and surprising in their choices of colors and materiality. But then it’s great to imagine him just getting bored and thinking, “I hate Nixon and the war so much that I feel the desire to really say something, to leave the ivory tower.” I have high respect for Guston and others who do that: questioning themselves or trying to leave their limitations behind.

Rail: You too always seem willing to leave a successful formula behind in the interest of experimentation. Can you talk about how the ways you use paint itself have changed?

Richter: A lot of the figurative work from twenty years ago came from an insecurity of how to handle the medium. I had to improvise and correct a lot. Now I feel more like somebody who finally knows how to use their instrument. But when I began these new works, I felt a certain insecurity because it seemed like I was making a bold move. More or less, I start with whatever: let's say two kids playing basketball. There's a certain movement and drama. I try to see that and transform it into a very fast drawing. It's a huge but very spontaneous decision. It’s less vorbereitet, you know that term?

Rail: Prepared.

Richter: Right. You could say that when you look at my work, it's less prepared than other people’s. It's doing something and then deciding, okay, I can figure this out now. I’m going to put the red on top, and then the painting is done. It's much more improvised, more free, you know?

Rail: I see that mix of spontaneity and confidence in the arabesques in the Stupor paintings. They seemed to stem from a very quick gesture but also from a confident hand.

Richter: I like hearing that you're impressed. Between us, I'm still a little insecure. While I’m working in the studio, I'm confident. I think, oh yeah, that's interesting. Okay, I can do that. It’s like standing on a diving board saying to yourself, "I can't do that. It's a 10 meter dive!” Then you take the leap, and right away you’re wondering if you hit the water cleanly enough. The moment of truth for me always comes when the stuff leaves the studio and hangs somewhere. So I'm looking forward to the Ropac installation.

Rail: Let's talk about the studio. You've compared it to a sponge that soaks up the real world and can be wrung out in paintings. All your work has a connection to the world. Where is it in these new paintings?

Richter: Well, there is nothing esoteric in the works, but I would have a hard time pointing out what their figures might represent, but they are definitely figures. There is some kind of stress or drama, and in the painting style there's a mix of control versus improvisation—outbursts of body parts versus abstract elements. Generally, all art that interests me relates to the world, even if it’s just a hint of something. But artists like Paul Klee don't just interest me at all. It just seems like anthroposophic doodling. Everything that is pure, I don't like. Minimalism—I understand it as decoration. It's very nice for a refrigerator, but I just have no interest in all that. I don’t hate it, but the whole idea of something being clear or reflecting some kind of Zen Buddhist philosophy mumbo jumbo I just hate.

Rail: But many of your drawings call to mind Klee’s work. They incorporate schematic or diagrammatic images that suggest new or hidden orders.

Richter: You may be right, but I deny that.

Rail: Okay, fair enough. Perhaps you’re the anti-Klee because you’re certainly not pointing to some higher spiritual plane. You have roots in the punk and anarchist scene in Hamburg and have brought an associated DIY aesthetic to all your endeavors, including your successful underground record label Buback, your imprint PAMPAM Publishing, and your projects with friends. Additionally, it seems to me that punk’s powerful mix of rage and humor is present throughout your work.

Richter: That's fair. I was lucky.

Rail: Yes, you’ve lived in interesting places in interesting times. First Hamburg, and now Berlin and Vienna. You teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Richter: I think all cities have their heydays. Hamburg was just really good from the seventies until the mid-nineties. This was because there were lots of opportunities that were not regulated by economical or market interests. There were a lot of places—the clubs, the red light district that were available for creative use. There were lots of bands because there were lots of places to rehearse and play, and there were lots of cheap bars and squatter houses. The police repression was also good in a paradoxical way. It made people think about where and how they lived. When you're confronted by police every day and also by neo-Nazis, who also attacked squatted houses, you see clearly what you’re resisting.

Rail: You were held at gunpoint by a Nazi.

Richter: This shit happens. I wouldn’t make too much of it. At some point, militancy is kind of unavoidable. But it’s not Colombia or Chile.

Rail: In the eighties there were many important painters in Hamburg, including Martin Kippenberger, Albert and Markus Oehlen, and Werner Büttner. You studied with Buttner. They were leading lights in the so-called Junge Wilden group, the “young wild ones” that were an international success coming from Germany in the 1980s.

Richter: They always denied being part of that. It makes sense because the so-called Junge Wilden were defined by subjectivism, an anti-rational outlook. But Oehlen and Kippenberger were not. They painted knowing that painting has a lot of flaws but that, for all its stupidity, it can also illuminate something about art and life. Büttner had a certain sense of humor related to the disasters of the twentieth century, with its failed utopias, the Cold War, all that. Through Büttner I got to know Albert Oehlen and became his assistant and friend. I would say they had a certain conceptual attitude towards painting. There was also a lot of humor or anger or cynicism or paradoxical formulations. I could relate to that. It was, you could say, my entrance into trying to understand art. It was not about subjectivism or expressing my feelings, like believing that the color blue has a certain emotional value. More like the opposite.

Rail: You’ve spoken about the reunification of Germany in 1990 as a kind of crisis for you.

Richter: Yeah. I'm one of the fifty people that weren’t happy about it.

Rail: Was this because you had aligned yourself with leftist, anti-capitalist factions?

Richter: Yeah. When the wall came down, it was clear that the fun times were over. The wave of patriotism, the whole “Wir Sind Ein Volk” feeling was just not my thing. I would point out that I consider myself anti-authority. The Soviet Union, socialism—those were failed experiments. But that does not mean that the opposite was the best choice. A system collapsed, and the winners did not make the best of it. It was a kind of crisis for me that forced me to rethink my life. For this reason I started studying art, which opened a lot of possibilities for me, also in terms of understanding my motivations.

Rail: Is your work German?

Richter: I didn't think about it when I was younger, but what is the German-ness in my work? When you traveled to London or to New York in the 1990s, you found out that people think in completely different ways. Their ideas were based on things like clarity or coherency. In Germany, even those people that I didn't like were challenging themselves, doubting themselves. In a way, Büttner’s mocking approach and Baselitz’s constant changing represent a very German, romantic idea of doubting yourself and being insecure and transforming that into something that’s a little bit heroic. There’s a certain selfishness in that, or vanity, but it’s so different from the attitudes of the English-speaking world. I was totally stunned when I met people who were reasoning in totally different ways. They were just down with themselves. They identified with the world. I was used to mocking my work. But I still define my life by saying I’m a painter. That’s what defines me. But, come on, it’s just some color on the wall somewhere. It seems that German art is actually ugly. I mean, aside from Hans Holbein, most German art, traditionally, from Cranach on, is ugly, or it's just miserable, particularly in the nineteenth century. Okay, Caspar David Friedrich established a Romantic language, but aside from that, it's just lame, boring shit.

Rail: Let’s talk about your collaborations. You have done a lot of projects with painter, sculptor, and performance artist Jonathan Meese and painter Tal R. You get together to make group projects.

Richter: I’m just a man who paints alone in the studio, so teaming up with friends is liberating. Especially because Jonathan is a very anti-authority figure. I know his reception is complicated, but as a person to work with, as a friend, he's just, you could say, extremely childish. There’s no no-go area, nothing you don’t do. He really enjoys doing things. It doesn’t matter how idiotic or childish or embarrassing. It’s great to meet and do things that you would never do alone. It’s liberating. It’s not so much like a band. It's more like three individuals decide to make music with chairs, trombones, and a refrigerator. I love it because it's also making a fool out of yourself. The market doesn’t need what we make. It's overproduction that’s not aimed at a viewer or a consumer. You just produce a lot and enjoy it, and then you throw it away. Or maybe people will take it home. Who cares, you know? I also love Jonathan's way of working with words. He's not analytical, he's just associative. It's the same with Tal who works with everything lying around. Give him chewing gum and a wastepaper basket, and he will do something with it. I cannot do that. I'm a control freak, but I really like it.

Rail: Would you say these collaborations reset your art chakras?

Richter: [Laughs] It just like, reminds me of the fact that it can also be really enjoyable and fun being an artist. I think, in general, people take their shit way too seriously. Nobody wants to make a fool out of themselves. And maybe I don't want to either, but I enjoy the idea that people can just make "dumb paintings.”

Rail: Is there some project or dream that you really want to realize?

Richter: Becoming a good painter. Sounds a little coy, I know.

Rail: I think you're on the way.