Los Angeles, California.- Regen Projects is proud to present “Daniel Richter: A Concert of Purpose and Action”, on view at the gallery from January 7th through February 18th. An opening reception for Daniel Richter will take place on Saturday, January 7th from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This will be the gallery’s second solo exhibition with German artist Daniel Richter. The show includes bold, new paintings that explore the boundaries of social order against the backdrop of anarchic disorder. Richter’s current works reference war, abstraction, rock and roll, history, our shared recent past, and the political present. The exhibition title is derived from Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 declaration of war on Germany, where the US President describes the role and purpose of America in relation to freedom and democracy worldwide. Richter’s large-scale paintings question the context of history painting in a society whose historiographic idea of progress has been significantly altered, hence Richter’s lone, heroic figures depicted singularly or in an ecstatic mass. These protagonists embody the various contradictions presented by the work: fear and joy, darkness and light, paranoia and security.
Within these strikingly colorful and exuberant works appear inhabitants of a mountain region whose landscape is composed of abstract patterns that reference natural or geological systems. Drawing from a complex visual vocabulary, Richter’s nomadic spaces allow for the intersections of exoticism, myth, and reality. The concept of the sublime in Richter’s large-scale tableaux characterizes contemporary natural landscapes that are inundated with an ideology from which their greatness is derived, both splendid and terrifying. Richter’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including the artist’s most recent show at the Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany. A major survey of the work opened in 2007 at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and traveled to the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands; the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; and the Denver Art Museum, Colorado, USA. In 2010, Richter designed a series of stage sets for the Salzburg Opera’s production of Lulu in conjunction with his solo museum exhibition at the Rupertinum Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg, Austria. In 1998 he was the recipient of the prestigious Otto Dix award, and in 2002 the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin awarded Richter the Preis der Nationalgalerie.
Daniel Richter’s work subverts the genre of epic historical painting. Often working from media images, his large-scale paintings reconstitute current events as timeless fables, spinning the anxiety of contemporary zeitgeist into overwhelming tableaux of allegorical fantasy. In Gedion, Richter paints a crowd of people outside a stadium. The figures are given a ghost-like presence, radiating with a supernatural aura. The carnival-esque atmosphere is infused with a malefic tension; a boozy Saturday night reconstituted as imperious myth. In the background, naked figures tend to the building; their presence is reminiscent of cherubs in Renaissance religious painting.
Regen Projects is a Los Angeles gallery which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2012. With two galleries located on Santa Monica Boulevard and North Altmont Drive, Regen Projects presents the best in contemporary art, with artists including John Currin, Anish Kapoor, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Wolfgang Tillmans and Gillian Wearing all represented. Visit the gallery’s website at … http://www.regenprojects.com