Daniel Richter

Painting Between Figuration and Abstraction

Art Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Business Community for a Native of Eutin

With the exhibition Daniel Richter. TORF, Schloss Gottorf concludes a successful museum season by presenting one of the most significant positions in contemporary painting. A total of 58 works, some of them large-format, by the internationally renowned artist transform the riding hall on the museum island in Schleswig into a vibrant place of art.

On the occasion of the awarding of the Art Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Business Community, Schloss Gottorf and the Dr. Dietrich Schulz Art Foundation honor the native of Eutin with a comprehensive retrospective. For the first time in over 20 years, the work of Daniel Richter can once again be experienced in a major exhibition in the North.

Richter’s first major solo museum exhibition took place in 2001 at the Kunsthalle Kiel. Many more, both in Germany and abroad, have followed since. The Kiel exhibition of 2001, named after Heinrich Böll’s novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine, marked an important milestone in the institutional recognition of Daniel Richter’s art. A year later, he received the “Promotional Award” of the Art Prize of the State of Schleswig-Holstein. Apart from gallery presentations in Lütjenburg, the artist - by now internationally celebrated many times over - has for years been only rarely present in his native region.

The Gottorf exhibition shows, alongside some earlier works, primarily paintings from the past ten years, which powerfully document Richter’s unmistakable signature between figurative narration and abstract composition. Radiant colors, strong contrasts, and emotional depth characterize the works, which reflect social and political themes as well as personal and mythological motifs. The refusal of the smooth gesture runs throughout Richter’s oeuvre. He was never interested in clearly legible political messages; nevertheless, he is a political artist in the sense of a critical contemporaneity. Daniel Richter, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, is today among the defining artists of his generation.

Daniel Richter’s path into the art world was by no means self-evident: in his youth he began, together with Schorsch Kamerun and Rocko Schamoni, as a “village punk” in Lütjenburg in the district of Plön, was politically active in the Antifa, and in the late 1980s immersed himself in Hamburg’s subculture and the burgeoning club scene on St. Pauli. Relatively late, at the age of 29, he decided to study at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, where, from 1991 to 1995, he was a student of Werner Büttner. Already a member of Büttner’s class at that time was Jonathan Meese, likewise from Eastern Holstein, who remains a close artistic friend of Richter to this day. After his studies, Daniel Richter experienced a meteoric rise in the international art world. His work testifies to an alert, critical mind that, despite all success, has preserved an ironic distance from the art market and its appropriations.

An exhibition on the occasion of the awarding of the 2025 Art Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Business Community to Daniel Richter by the Dr. Dietrich Schulz Art Foundation.