Daniel Richter Lonely Old Slogans
21er Haus – Museum Of Contemporary Art
Arsenalstrasse
1030 Vienna
Daniel Richter is one of the most important painters of his generation, and of great significance for Vienna, not only because of his professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts. With the exhibition Daniel Richter – Lonely Old Slogans, the 21er Haus presents for the first time in Vienna a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work.
Structured as a retrospective, the exhibition seeks to document Richter’s evolution from his earliest works through the present. Included are the edgy and expressive abstractions of the 1990s that reflect his occupation as a designer of album covers for various punk rock bands and theatrical figurative scenes. The most recent series of works, from 2015, are dedicated primarily to the human figure and erotic corporeality.
Richter, invariably a politically motivated painter, describes his theatrical works as a new form of History Painting. The representation of a concrete historical event, however, has been lost. Instead, the pictures are trying to capture a specific spirit or atmosphere in contemporary history, characterized by the absence of any grand political utopian ideas.
