A 2002 review of a Daniel Richter exhibition at Düsseldorf’s K21 stated: “art scene star flirts with history painting.” This was the first comprehensive show of his figurative pictures for which he is best known today. Until the end of the 1990s, Richter’s work was abstract. Since then, peculiarly faceless groups or hordes of people populate his paintings instead of simply colors and shapes. An atmosphere of latent or direct violence can often be observed in them. The scene may take place in the street, outside a department store, or somewhere in the woods.

Frequently, Richter’s figures seem incorporeally flat as if they were made of something fluid. They are chimera and ghosts whose ancestors first appeared in the world of medieval spirits and place in art history was furthered by such artists as Bosch, Breughel and Goya, and even later by Edvard Munch, James Ensor, Otto Dix and Max Ernst. Richter freely uses and quotes these models as well as multiple commercial images. Among the pictures he takes and then treats in his painterly way are press photographs of a bomb crater in Kabul or the the attack on the U.S. embassy in Tanzania. Once a part of Hamburg’s “Hafenstraße” squatter scene and a regular at the legendary Golden Pudel Club, Richter still defines his political position as left-wing radical. His themes include the 1923 Communist uprising in Hamburg- Barmbek as well as images of African refugee boats. A painting from 2002 bears the title Why I am a conservative. Despite his openly formulated political statements, Richter is considered one of the painting scene’s pop stars. Some even suggest that the codes of social criticism in his works helped to further his pop star image.

Born in 1962 in the Schleswig-Holstein town of Eutin, Daniel Richter studied with Werner Büttner and was Albert Oehlen’s assistant. Although he started out as an abstract painter, around the year 2000 this changed in favor of figurative painting. Since 2006 he has been a professor for “Expanded Painterly Space” in Vienna. Recently, he also created stage sets for the Salzburg Festival.