HANNOVER.- Daniel Richter (*1962 in Eutin, lives and works in Berlin) is one of Germany’s most important contemporary painters and has made his name with a hybrid of abstraction and figuration. The kestnergesellschaft is now showing new paintings and drawings from 2008 to 2011 which deal with conflictual narrations and the vocabulary of the line. The starting point for these works is the collection of fantastical tales known as the »1001 Nights«. Richter transforms these Arabic stories into menacing, fairytale-like scenarios that allude to an orientalism which has changed since 9/11. As the title indicates, Richter’s works contain an extra zero – a Ground Zero – that gives the fantastical element an eerie and at the same time very concrete touch. These new works distance themselves from the tight crowds and urban settings of earlier paintings, and concentrate on a very few