DANIEL RICHTER – I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER
2018-09-03This group of large-scale oil paintings constitutes the next experimental step in a visual language which the artist has developed throughout his career. Since his formative years in Berlin as an assistant to Albert Oehlen, Richter’s paintings have synthesised art history, mass media, politics, sex and contemporary culture into ever-changing pictorial worlds.
Richter’s current style, which oscillates between figuration and abstraction, represents a radical departure from his former approach to painting, both in terms of subject and form. Lines of crayon-oil contour patches of colour to reveal body-like shapes in seemingly pornographic poses: spread legs, arched backs, grasping hands and wide-open mouths can be deciphered. Richter explains: “My concern is with the surface, this flat, tangled, never-changing scheme of figure constellations, in and out”. The figures seem to levitate and collide. The cannibalising shapes convey a sense of abstraction, which is reinforced by the background’s subtle gradations of colours.
Opposite – They thenmen took over then, 2018
Exhibition runs through to September 28th, 2018
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Ely House
37 Dover Street
W1S 4NJ London
