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Lot Essay
Executed in 2010, Daniel Richter’s N.W.A. is poised between sublimity and paranoia. It deftly depicts a spectacular landscape in aqueous lines of oil paint. The viewer beholds a craggy orange mountain. Ever taller and darker peaks rise into the distance. Richter invokes the shadow of the German Romantics and their paeans towards the majesty and unknowability of transcendent nature. Yet this natural marvel is inhabited by three eerie figures glowing in a luminous yellow. One of them, only visible as a head at the bottom of the picture frame, appears to be staring out at the viewer. Have we trespassed into an environment where we do not belong? The work’s title, a reference to the hugely influential West Coast hip hop group, adds a further layer to the enigma.
Richter is a penetrating investigator of the nature of vision. In N.W.A., his mysterious figures seem to be caught by thermal imaging. Describing Richter’s engagement with contemporary ways of seeing, curator Christopher Heinrich says: ‘Richter's pictures are light-painting, though not in the sense of atmosphere created by chiaroscuro or of plein-airisme, but as experiments with contemporary forms of light’ (C. Heinrich, ‘Watch out for the bird!’, in Daniel Richter: Die Palette, 1995-2007, exh. cat. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 2007, p. 21).
Richter’s interest in finding new possibilities in paint echoes the work of his countryman Albert Oehlen, for whom he once worked as an assistant. Like Oehlen he has devoted his practice to reshaping and reinventing the medium of painting, while never losing a sense of wonder in its possibilities. In a recent interview he said: ‘My work is based on only one belief system, and that's the church of painting’ (D. Richter, quoted in O. Kupper, ‘Daniel Richter: A Very Boring Dream Come True’, Autre, 3 November 2022). N.W.A. is a teasing reminder that painting still holds many mysteries.
Richter is a penetrating investigator of the nature of vision. In N.W.A., his mysterious figures seem to be caught by thermal imaging. Describing Richter’s engagement with contemporary ways of seeing, curator Christopher Heinrich says: ‘Richter's pictures are light-painting, though not in the sense of atmosphere created by chiaroscuro or of plein-airisme, but as experiments with contemporary forms of light’ (C. Heinrich, ‘Watch out for the bird!’, in Daniel Richter: Die Palette, 1995-2007, exh. cat. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 2007, p. 21).
Richter’s interest in finding new possibilities in paint echoes the work of his countryman Albert Oehlen, for whom he once worked as an assistant. Like Oehlen he has devoted his practice to reshaping and reinventing the medium of painting, while never losing a sense of wonder in its possibilities. In a recent interview he said: ‘My work is based on only one belief system, and that's the church of painting’ (D. Richter, quoted in O. Kupper, ‘Daniel Richter: A Very Boring Dream Come True’, Autre, 3 November 2022). N.W.A. is a teasing reminder that painting still holds many mysteries.