The Denver Art Museum (DAM) announced today that it will host Daniel Richter: A Major Survey, the first U.S. museum exhibition for the acclaimed contemporary German artist. Curated by Denver Art Museum's Christoph Heinrich, the exhibition will feature more than 25 large-format paintings and a selection from a series of more than 400 small format works.
"The Richter exhibition is a natural step in the evolution of the Denver Art Museum's modern and contemporary programming, and we are thrilled to bring this internationally significant exhibition to the United States," said Lewis I. Sharp, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum. Christoph Heinrich, the Polly and Mark Addison Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the DAM, recently joined the museum from the Hamburg Kunsthalle where he curated a similar exhibition of Richter's work in 2007, and edited the catalog that will accompany the Denver show. "This introduction of Richter's work to Denver and the U.S. museum painting, driven in part by the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as an overall saturation with electronically-generated images," said Heinrich. "Richter's sense of humor and vigorous celebration of painting come through in this work, and he never lets us forget the continuous thread that runs through the history of painting."
Born in Germany in 1962, Richter developed his artistic background designing posters and record sleeves for punk bands in the 1980s. As his career evolved, he studied painting at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste, spending considerable time with Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner. Richter's work combines clichés from art history, the mass media and popular culture, creating unusual narratives and pictorial worlds. The exhibition will provide an overview of his painting to date, illustrating an evolution from his earlier abstract works, with bold psychedelic colors that oscillate between graffiti and pattern, to works that morphed abstraction into depictions of the human figure, often inspired by images in newspapers and history books.
One of Richter's earlier abstract works, WUTANG (2000), combines bright, vibrant pulsating color and delicate forms. The visual reference to thermographic imaging and the light shining through the figures implies a culture of surveillance, in which the figures are not just aggressors, but passive objects as well. In 2005, Richter took a brief hiatus from larger-stage scenes to focus on more intimate theatrical spaces, and a succession of isolated figures appear in his work. In Ferbenlaare (2005), the figure appears virtually paralyzed by a grid, recalling the color chart paintings of Gerhard Richter.
The Denver Art Museum's exhibition will follow a gallery show of the artist's work at New York City's David Zwirner Gallery this spring. Daniel Richter: A Major Survey will be on view in the Anschutz Gallery, located in the museum's Hamilton Building. Opened in 2006, the 146,000 square foot Hamilton Building nearly doubled the size of the facility, allowing the museum to display more of its permanent collections, as well as the ability to host more traveling exhibitions. The show will be included with general museum admission. -- www.denverartmuseum.org
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