ART CITIES:Amsterdam-Daniel Richter

Daniel Richter’s practice has evolved over time to encompass notable stylistic turns. Richter’s paintings synthesize art history, mass media, politics, sex, and contemporary culture into ever-changing pictorial worlds. The artist maintains that the dichotomy between abstract and figurative painting is a constructed fiction, since the formal problems of color and composition remain constant. This framework for thinking about painting continues to inform the development of Richter’s approach. 

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: GRIMM Gallery Archive

Daniel Richter present new works in his solo exhibition “Funky Dimes” at Grimm Gallery in Amsterdam. His  work synthesizes art history, mass media, politics, and sex into ever-changing pictorial worlds. Richter rose to prominence in the 1990s with dense and brightly-colored abstract paintings recalling his work as an album cover designer for German punk bands in the 1980s. The year 2000 marked a significant stylistic change in Richter’s visual language, with new paintings focusing on figurative imagery drawn from newspapers and historical references rendered atmospheric and mysterious.

Since 2015, Richter has focused on painting gestural forms which recall distorted bodies moving and interacting in space. Frequently rendered against flat two-tone backgrounds, limbs are distorted into gesture and bold color, as Richter describes his compositional approach as “control versus improvisation—outbursts of body parts versus abstract elements.”²On view in “Funky Dimes”, Richter’s “BROSIS” depicts a green, red, and black figure with a mask-like face outlined in black and yellow oil-stick coming into contact with an abstracted form with similar coloring. There is a palpable intensity to the lefthand figure’s expression, as well as the forcible contact of its foot and arm, which dissolve into the figure on the right side of the canvas. In “Darkdays and dogdays”, the background tones of rust and light pink give it a similar sense of horizon line, albeit with a greater number of bulbous yellow figures grasping at each other. In the intense interplay of fractured anatomic forms and abstract marks in these new works, Richter defines physical connection as enigmatic, ghostly, orgiastic, and violent.

As a counterpoint to these two large-scale pieces, the exhibition also features six new paintings by Richter which reference his surreal and figurative ‘history paintings’ from the early to mid-2000s. Three of these works depict shadowy figures in hazy and surreal landscapes, whereas the other works, including “Pandorian paintings” revisited, allude to battle and political upheaval in urban settings.

In both bodies of work, Richter continues his decades-long fascination with deconstructing the supposed distinctions between abstraction and figuration via the dynamic interaction of gesture, color, and composition.

Photo: Daniel Richter, Augustinus erkennt die Natur der Sache, 2026, Oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm, © Daniel Richter, Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Gallery

Info: Grimm Gallery, Keizersgracht 241, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 29/5-11/7/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://grimmgallery.com/