DANIEL RICHTER | Dominanz der Annalen

signed, titled and dated 2013 on the reverse

Timothy Taylor, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Presenting an electrically sublime mountainous landscape, Dominanz der Annalen hails from a special series of works within Daniel Richter’s ever-evolving oeuvre. After creating mostly abstract-ornamental works from 1994 to 2000, Richter shifted towards his acclaimed politically informed realism in the 2000s, integrating art history, mass media and pop culture into idiosyncratic worlds saturated with fluorescent psychedelic hues. While works from the 2000s evoke conflict, menace, aggression and anxiety, from around 2012 to 2013 Richter created a series of large landscape vistas that emanate a paradoxical calmness in spite of his signature frenzy of exploding colors. In the present work, pink cotton-candy clouds float against a poison-green sky, punctuated by red and dusty rose mountain ranges, which are accented by flashes of neon orange and forest green. These extraordinary color fields are at times strictly outlined while vague and indefinite at others, bleeding and dissolving into each other in a consummate orchestration of line, form, color and composition. Other works in the series sometimes depict lone mysterious figures within the landscape; in the present painting, the stark purity of the landscape posits Richter’s work within a long tradition of landscape painting whilst also foregrounding the artist’s unique aesthetic that blurs the boundaries of abstraction and figuration. In the artist’s own words: “Ultimately, there is no difference between abstraction and figurative painting, apart from certain forms of their decipherability, but the problems of organizing paint on surface always remain the same”.