Daniel Richter

Daniel Richter – Self-assured artist with political commitment

Daniel Richter was born on 18 December 1962 in Eutin. He spent his childhood and teenage years in Lütjenburg and studied from 1991 to 1995 under Werner Büttner in Hamburg at the University of Fine Arts. Following this, he worked for a time as assistant to Albert Oehlen and designed LP covers for punk bands; Richter today is the owner of the Hamburg independent label Buback. In 2004 he was appointed professor at the University of Arts in Berlin but resigned in 2006 due to fundamental differences. That same year, he followed the call to Vienna to teach at the Academy of Fine arts as professor at the Studio of Expanded Pictorial Space. Having formerly belonged to the left-wing radical scene, Daniel and his wife, the theatre director Angela Richter, are also politically involved in the left-wing Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, founded in 2016. In fighting for his convictions, he does not even stop at big names: in an interview in 2017, he swiftly dismissed his famous namesake Gerhard Richter’s criticism of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy as “idiotic talk”. 

Neon-coloured doomsday scenarios and society portraits

Daniel Richter began his career as an abstract artist and examined exclusively the formal questions in painting in his early years but discarded this approach in 2000 in favour of developing his own, more figurative and narrative-based pictorial language. The psychological levels of these works can in part be interpreted as autobiographical, but function in the first as a subjective reflection of the artist’s perceived environment and social development. With his doomsday scenarios, Daniel Richter is closely reminiscent of Francis Bacon or Hieronymus Bosch, but avoids gruesome detail and usually only gives subtle hints. His work is also not free of self-irony, which for the artist is an essential feature of progressive art. He often applies his neon paints directly with his finger – for all his leaning towards representationalism, Daniel Richter still retains a certain tendency to abstraction. 

Awards and provocations; international attention

Daniel Richter has received prizes and honours for his work, including the Otto Dix Prize in 1998 and the Förderpreis für Junge Kunst in Schleswig-Holstein in 2002. In 2009, he was awarded the 20,000-euro Finkenwerder Art Prize, which is one of the most highly endowed art prizes in Europe. Despite occasionally provocative motifs such as his notorious Taliban idylls, Richter has established himself as a modern artist, with even a creative crisis of several years not restraining him permanently from creative activity. In 2015 he suddenly presented a type of pornographic art consisting of blurred depictions of colourful appendages. Richter likes it when his audience doesn’t immediately recognise what is actually being depicted – the interpretationally unsorted chaos has its own charm for the artist, who is still a little bit punk at heart.

Daniel Richter lives and works in Vienna, Hamburg and Berlin.