In every branch of the arts, but especially visual art, conglomeration drives 21st-century creativity.
With the seemingly limitless reach of Google and other high-tech tools, artists have at their fingertips imagery from high culture and low, past times and present and distant shores and near, and they fuse them like never before.
So it is with fast-rising German artist Daniel Richter, who is spotlighted through Jan. 11 in a midcareer survey at the Denver Art Museum — his first solo museum exhibition in the United States.
“I really like being here because it’s kind of a shaky time, because of the recession, the $700 billion bailout, the Obama-McCain thing,” he said before the show’s opening. “I feel like a painter of crisis, and being in a small crisis does really kind of excite me,”
The 46-year-old artist is open to inspiration from anywhere, and he finds it virtually everywhere, from art history to comic books (he scoured local shops) to newspaper photographs. Almost anything is fair game.
Then, after mixing, matching and merging ideas and elements from all these disparate sources, he manages to create something distinctively new — paintings and drawings that are unmistakably his.
Some of these works would seem impossible to solidify because of the varied elements colliding in them. But somehow Richter holds everything in balance, using the competing and often unlikely mix of ingredients to supercharge the whole.
A telling example is “Tuanus” (2000), an enigmatic scene showing two men being put up against a tree and searched by four police officers, or more ominously, militia members. It’s unclear.
The composition is inspired by a magazine photograph that Richter found showing a drug search, but, as odd as it might sound, it is set in a kind of impressionist forest environment.
The impressionistic treatment of the leaves and other parts of canvas blur into lively abstract-expressionism elsewhere. This sounds like a mess, but the painting defiantly works.
The exact meaning of Richter’s works is never clear. If hints of hope are sprinkled through the show, darker emotions rule — loss, desolation and fear. This is tough beauty.
Although the artist alludes to real life, realism is not his aim. As curator Christoph Heinrich points out in a catalog essay, the compositions are a kind of visual theater — “art through artifice.”
Richter’s paintings occasionally make references to German history, such as “Phienox” (2000), based on the fall of the Berlin Wall, or “Captain Jack” (2006), which cannot help but be seen in the context of the Holocaust.
For the most part there is nothing specifically German about the subject matter. Yet, suffusing everything is an unquestionable angst and questioning that seem very much a part of that country’s zeitgeist.
“Everyone tries to flee that certain Germanness,” Richter said, “but everybody just gives birth to a new weird version of something that everyone else will say is German.
“The moment I entered this (figurative) field, the feedback I got just forced me to admit that I’m coming from a certain root. Even though I try to avoid or fight it, the whole attitude, the seriousness of the painting, the self-punishing thing, is all too German.”
While these paintings incorporate an almost dizzying array of subjects, moods and influences, there is nonetheless a sense of unity among them.
Part of this continuity derives from common qualities that run through all of them, such as Richter’s virtuoso paint handling. He said he relies only on brushes to apply the oil paint, but he achieves an extraordinarily nuanced array of effects.
“It’s really trying to stretch the medium as far as possible,” he said.
Shimmering effects
A superb example is “Trevelfast” (2004), a ghostly painting in which a vague, specterlike horse and rider — rendered in opaque, black silhouette — run behind a tree, which becomes unexpectedly the central compositional device.
Richter activates the leaves and lively foliage in the rest of the painting with shimmering colors across nearly the entire range of the spectrum, using a sublime mix of drips, splotches and translucent washes.
Especially fascinating is his use of masking tape. Usually, it is applied to divide sections of a canvas, but Richter employed it as a kind of compositional motif. Short strips of tape were placed almost randomly on the canvas and then pulled off, their outlines still visible under washes of color.
Also integral to these works is the painter’s unusual deployment of light. If some of the selections have a subdued feel, such as “Introspection” (2007-08), others explode with blasts of electrified color.
“Richter’s pictures are light paintings, though not in the sense of atmospheric chiaroscuro or open-air traditions,” writes Heinrich. “Instead, they experiment with contemporary forms of light: artificial light, camera flash, thermal imaging, X-ray, atomic glow.”
Richter began in the 1980s creating posters and record covers. But in 1992, in the upheaval following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he decided to switch to fine art, undertaking four years of studies in Hamburg.
For the first years of his second career, he focused on abstraction, as several examples in the show illustrate. Then he moved into the figurative art for which he is now best known, though the boundaries between the two remain fluid.
This evolution is not clearly laid out in the show, because Richter, who insists on installing his exhibitions, did not want it to be chronological. Instead, he arranged it aesthetically, placing works where he thought they looked best in the space.
“That’s criticism toward the curators and directors that I’ve met in the last 10 years,” he said. “Most of them tend to underrate the viewer and tend to do something that is either very formalistic or very based on the narrative — a superficial, academic ideal.
“I know the work best, and I think I know the weaknesses of the work the best.”
At home in the space
For the most part, this freestyle approach works. With ample amounts of open wall space, this show is more airy than any the museum has presented previously in the 11,000-square-foot Anschutz Gallery.
Some viewers might think the space looks a bit spartan, but the openness allows the works ample room to be properly viewed and contemplated.
This offering is the American extension of an exhibition that Heinrich put together when he was chief curator of contemporary art, collections and exhibitions at the Hamburg Kunsthalle in Germany. It toured to two other cities — the Hague, Netherlands, and Málaga, Spain.
After taking over as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum in September 2007, he decided that it made sense to bring a version of that offering here as the first major temporary exhibition of his tenure.
Richter’s often challenging work will not have the big draw of previous exhibitions in this gallery because it inevitably appeals to a narrower range of tastes.
But it is clear that this highly original, technically gifted painter is worthy of such an ambitious showcase, and the museum deserves credit for putting artistic values above attendance numbers.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
“Daniel Richter: A Major Survey.”
Art. Denver Art Museum, West 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock Street. On view is the first solo museum exhibition in the United States to spotlight 46-year-old German artist Daniel Richter. Through Jan. 11. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Free with regular museum admission. 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org.
