Schluss mit Fussball!

Daniel Richter emerged as a leading light in German contemporary painting in 1995 with his dizzying abstractions of hallucinogenic colours and forms. Born in 1962, Daniel Richter belongs to the post-Pop generation of painters who are unhindered by art history's often hierarchical definitions of the abstract versus representation in painting, believing instead that contemporary reality is sufficiently complex to merit multiple styles of image-making.

As Richter's skills sharpened, so did the graphic aspects of his abstractions. Painted in an impressive variety of techniques, including staining, spraying, splashing and more traditional rendering, they became reminiscent of lurid graffiti scrawled on a subway tunnel. Drawing loosely from a variety of art historical sources, in particular a contemporary take on Abstract Expressionism, his apparently random scrawls, daubs and splashes mingle into a trippy psychedelic cacophony of neon colours and distorted forms that converge into deliberately over-full compositions. The dynamism of these compositions lies in tension between forms apparently exploding and imploding simultaneously. The force with which they first assault the viewer give way over time to a sense of lingering disquiet and unease.