.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection since the year after it was made, Das geheime Wissen der Zebrafische (The Secret Knowledge of Zebrafish) (1999) is a monumental painting that marks the climax of Daniel Richter’s early abstract period. Having transitioned in the early 1990s from the Hamburg punk scene to the studio, Richter spent the latter part of the decade creating riotous, psychedelic and overloaded abstract paintings that pushed the medium to its limits. The present work is packed with eye-popping technique and incident, ranging from multi-directional splashes of liquid enamel to sprayed lines, sinuous hand-painted loops, cartoonish biomorphic shapes and hard-edged stencilled grids, all in an electric palette of magentas, blues, greens and blazing sunset hues. An extraordinary crescendo to his abstract phase—which would shift in the new millennium towards a more figurative approach—the work was included in Mozart on Television: New Painting from Germany at Deitch Projects, New York in the summer of 1999, as part of Richter’s first exhibition outing in the United States.
Richter started his career as a graphic designer in the 1980s, creating posters and record covers for bands in Hamburg’s left-wing underground. He carried over this rebellious spirit to his painterly practice. From 1992-1996 he studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg under Werner Büttner, who was a figurehead—alongside such artists as Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen—of the rowdy, bad-mannered Neo-Expressionist revival of German painting that had taken the 1980s art world by storm. Like Oehlen, in whose studio he later assisted and who became a close friend, Richter reacted against Conceptual coolness and conventional good taste by filling his paintings with as much as they could take. Attaining what he called ‘pure materialism,’ his canvases were intricate and intense. They were layered with seething colour in every physical state, by turns fluid, opaque, washed, patterned, masked and daubed, and held together by a mastery of chaotic composition.
At the close of the 1990s, Richter created a group of large paintings, including Das geheime Wissen der Zebrafische, that summarised the cumulative achievements of this period. This was ‘a gesture’, writes Eva Meyer-Hermann, ‘that he now describes as “wisdom unfurled in front of itself.”’ Noting the present work’s ‘science-fiction-like idiom’, she observes how it plunges us ‘into a world that no longer has anything to do with the familiar space of our perception; the codes of these dimensions, which are suggested in the streaks, stripes, and graphic patterns, elude our human horizon. Whether they are amoebas, highly intricate structures, utopian landscapes, or models of the universe is impossible to decide’ (E. Meyer-Hermann, Daniel Richter: Paintings Then and Now, Berlin 2023, p. 74).
Richter started his career as a graphic designer in the 1980s, creating posters and record covers for bands in Hamburg’s left-wing underground. He carried over this rebellious spirit to his painterly practice. From 1992-1996 he studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg under Werner Büttner, who was a figurehead—alongside such artists as Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen—of the rowdy, bad-mannered Neo-Expressionist revival of German painting that had taken the 1980s art world by storm. Like Oehlen, in whose studio he later assisted and who became a close friend, Richter reacted against Conceptual coolness and conventional good taste by filling his paintings with as much as they could take. Attaining what he called ‘pure materialism,’ his canvases were intricate and intense. They were layered with seething colour in every physical state, by turns fluid, opaque, washed, patterned, masked and daubed, and held together by a mastery of chaotic composition.
At the close of the 1990s, Richter created a group of large paintings, including Das geheime Wissen der Zebrafische, that summarised the cumulative achievements of this period. This was ‘a gesture’, writes Eva Meyer-Hermann, ‘that he now describes as “wisdom unfurled in front of itself.”’ Noting the present work’s ‘science-fiction-like idiom’, she observes how it plunges us ‘into a world that no longer has anything to do with the familiar space of our perception; the codes of these dimensions, which are suggested in the streaks, stripes, and graphic patterns, elude our human horizon. Whether they are amoebas, highly intricate structures, utopian landscapes, or models of the universe is impossible to decide’ (E. Meyer-Hermann, Daniel Richter: Paintings Then and Now, Berlin 2023, p. 74).