Complex layers of shape and pattern pulsate across the large expanse of Daniel Richter’s Schwarz-Weissbeschiss (Black and White Swindle) (1999-2000). Stormy smears of cream, grey and pink paint crash into one another. Rippled patterns and fleets of polka-dots have been masked off with tape, lending them crisp, graphic edges; looping lines of spray-paint hover hazily on the surface. Some thick pigment is marbled together—recalling the squeegee technique of the artist’s older namesake, Gerhard Richter—while other areas rain dilute drips down the canvas. With a tree-like foreground and a backdrop that echoes a tempestuous sky, hints of landscape flicker amid the rich chaos of the composition. Indeed, the turn of the millennium saw a transition from Richter’s psychedelic mid-1990s abstractions towards the radical figuration of his later career: in works like Schwarz-Weissbeschiss, he dialled back his palette towards darker tones and began to introduce amorphous pictorial elements, animating the painting with protean potential.
A student of Werner Büttner from 1992 to 1996, and later a studio assistant to Albert Oehlen, Richter was an heir to the spirit of the 1980s Junge Wilde. These artists took a sledgehammer to aesthetic convention, sampling and remixing art-historical genres and championing so-called ‘bad painting’. Richter’s early abstractions were almost painfully colourful, reflecting the influence of punk, graffiti and Neo-Expressionism alike, and crammed with pattern and incident. Via the darker experiments of works like Schwarz-Weissbeschiss, he later shifted towards large, theatrical figurative compositions that were often based on photographs of current events: subverting the genre of history painting, these luminous, enigmatic visions are freighted with socio-political narrative. Throughout his constantly evolving practice, Richter has pushed the boundaries of his medium. With its echoes of Christopher Wool’s anxious, scrubbed-out scrawls and the stencilled, splashed and screenprinted complexities of Sigmar Polke, Schwarz-Weissbeschiss sees an artist grappling with how much his painting can hold, and setting the stage for new stories to emerge from the surface.