SIREN

DANIEL RICHTER (B. 1962)

SIREN

signed, titled and dated 'D. Richter 2019 SIREN' (on the reverse)

oil on canvas

90 1/2 x 70 7/8 inches (230 x 180 cm)

framed: 91 3/4 x 71 7/8 inches (233 x 183 cm)

Painted in 2019.

PROVENANCE:

Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Acquired from the above by the present owner

EXHIBITED:

Los Angeles, Regen Projects, Daniel Richter: H.P. (jah allo), 29 June-17 August, 2019.

NOTES:

Born in 1962 in Eutin, Germany, Daniel Richter is one of the most dynamic and influential painters working today, celebrated for his fearless engagement with the possibilities of contemporary figuration. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg under the conceptual painter Werner Büttner, a key figure of the Junge Wilde generation whose irreverent approach to painting deeply informed Richter’s early sensibility. Since emerging in the 1990s, Richter has developed a visual language that bridges the intensity of German Expressionism with the sensibilities of contemporary culture. Drawing from art history and media imagery, he creates surreal worlds charged with political tension and the collective psychology of the crowd. His work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions, including a traveling solo exhibition presented at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; the 21er Haus, Vienna; and the Camden Arts Centre, London (2016-17). His paintings are held in significant public collections worldwide, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; and the Hamburger Kunsthalle. He lives and works in Berlin.

Throughout his career, Richter has continually redefined the role of the figure in painting, shifting between abstraction and representation to probe the uneasy relationship between image, ideology, and the body. His works draw equally from art history and popular culture, merging the grand gestures of Romanticism and Expressionism with the saturated chaos of contemporary media. Following his dramatic shift in 2015 toward a looser, more improvisational mode of painting, Richter’s SIREN (2019) exemplifies the artist’s fascination with form, motion, and the instability of meaning. The canvas is divided into two vibrating color fields: at the top, a glowing expanse of orange, and below, a deep red gradient that fades again into orange along the lower edge. Against this radiant and flat ground, a spectral figure emerges, its body wavering between visibility and dissolution. Limbs are rendered in electric greens and yellows, their contours traced in black, evoking both the urgency of gesture and the blur of perception. Beneath the figure’s twisting and contorted posture are another pair of blue legs, lending the composition a sense of violence and sensuality. As in much of Richter’s recent work, the scene feels at once mythic and psychological, presenting tension between control and collapse through a choreography of bodies caught in flux.

In SIREN, Richter abandons fixed narrative in favor of immediacy, translating movement and shifting emotion into fields of color and line. The work’s title evokes both allure and danger, mirroring the painting’s magnetic tension between beauty and unease. Through this fluid abstraction of the human form, Richter continues his exploration of what it means to see and to feel within a fractured contemporary world. The figures, suspended between emergence and erasure, seem to pulse with life even as they dissolve, embodying the artist’s enduring preoccupation with transformation, desire, and the unstable borders of the self.