Daniel Richter: Paintings Then and Now

The first chronological account of Daniel Richter's painting, and one that treats his swings between abstraction and figuration as a continuous argument rather than a run of abrupt reversals.

Eva Meyer-Hermann edits and writes the book, following more than 200 works across 464 pages and some 400 plates. Her reading is that the turns critics have described as breaks look, up close, like consequences - deliberate moves by a painter working out how to be modern in a medium long written off as old-fashioned. Where postwar German painting mostly took the past as its subject, Richter positions himself in the present, making pictures that make demands on the viewer without offering a moral. Verena Dengler, Max Hollein, Roberto Ohrt and Cord Riechelmann contribute further texts; Yvonne Quirmbach designed the volume, which Hatje Cantz published in May 2023 in parallel English and German editions.

Daniel Richter (b. 1962, Eutin) came out of the autonomous left-wing scene of the 1980s, designing record sleeves and posters before studying under Werner Büttner in Hamburg. He has taught in Berlin and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and has been among the most visible painters of his generation for more than twenty years.