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Lot Essay
Completed in 2004, and held in the same private collection since the following year, the present work is a study for Daniel Richter’s monumental 2001 painting Tarifa. Part of a series inspired by news stories, it is based on a photograph from an article published in 2000, depicting African migrants stranded in a small boat en route to the Spanish resort of Tarifa on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. Timely and poignant, the work translates its daytime source image into a scene of dark and electric colour contrasts, as if detected at night through an infrared lens. During the early 2000s, Richter moved away from the riotous abstract language that he had inherited from the German ‘Junge Wilde’ and began to engage with more politically-charged imagery. The present work is emblematic of this turning point: its large-scale companion became an icon of his practice, starring in the acclaimed exhibition Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2020.
Heir to the legacies of German Neo-Expressionism, Richter studied with Werner Büttner in the 1990s, and went on to work as Albert Oehlen’s studio assistant. These artists, along with Martin Kippenberger, Georg Herold and others, had energised the Cologne art scene during the previous decade, railing against aesthetic standards and championing a free, subversive approach that came to be known as ‘bad painting’. While Richter drew inspiration from many of their achievements, towards the turn of the millennium he began to embrace a more figurative, expressive language. Among his influences was Neo Rauch, whose strange, otherworldly tableaux responded to the changing political and cultural landscape of his time. He was equally influenced by his encounters with the work of Pierre Bonnard at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which—he believed—offered an important precedent for exploring the relationship between paint and photography. Here, Richter’s saturated colours are dappled with specks of light, like a grainy snapshot. The sea in the lower half of the canvas swims with alchemical tones of violet, teal and midnight blue, as if still in the process of developing in a darkroom.
The work takes its place within a long legacy of shipwreck paintings: from Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa—appropriated, notably, by Kippenberger during the 1990s—to works by J. M. W. Turner and Max Beckmann. It also invites comparison with the paintings of Richter’s contemporary Peter Doig, whose landmark series 100 Years Ago depicted a lone, stranded canoeist staring hauntingly out of the boat at the viewer. Yet ultimately, as Beate Ermacora writes, ‘[the] scene relegates the whole Romantic tradition of heroic seascapes to the category of a sentimental delusion: these figures are not poetic meditations on the human condition, but emblems of a very real crisis’ (B. Ermacora, quoted in Daniel Richter: Billard um halbzehn, exh. cat. Schleswig-Holsteinischen Kunstverein, Kunsthalle zu Kiel 2001, p. 119). The work, in this sense, also conjures the luminous silkscreen paintings of Andy Warhol, whose depictions of race riots and car crashes asked if mass circulation of images made us immune to the tragedies within them. Here, Richter affirms the power of paint to bring these stories to life: twenty years after its creation, the image continues to resonate globally.
Heir to the legacies of German Neo-Expressionism, Richter studied with Werner Büttner in the 1990s, and went on to work as Albert Oehlen’s studio assistant. These artists, along with Martin Kippenberger, Georg Herold and others, had energised the Cologne art scene during the previous decade, railing against aesthetic standards and championing a free, subversive approach that came to be known as ‘bad painting’. While Richter drew inspiration from many of their achievements, towards the turn of the millennium he began to embrace a more figurative, expressive language. Among his influences was Neo Rauch, whose strange, otherworldly tableaux responded to the changing political and cultural landscape of his time. He was equally influenced by his encounters with the work of Pierre Bonnard at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which—he believed—offered an important precedent for exploring the relationship between paint and photography. Here, Richter’s saturated colours are dappled with specks of light, like a grainy snapshot. The sea in the lower half of the canvas swims with alchemical tones of violet, teal and midnight blue, as if still in the process of developing in a darkroom.
The work takes its place within a long legacy of shipwreck paintings: from Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa—appropriated, notably, by Kippenberger during the 1990s—to works by J. M. W. Turner and Max Beckmann. It also invites comparison with the paintings of Richter’s contemporary Peter Doig, whose landmark series 100 Years Ago depicted a lone, stranded canoeist staring hauntingly out of the boat at the viewer. Yet ultimately, as Beate Ermacora writes, ‘[the] scene relegates the whole Romantic tradition of heroic seascapes to the category of a sentimental delusion: these figures are not poetic meditations on the human condition, but emblems of a very real crisis’ (B. Ermacora, quoted in Daniel Richter: Billard um halbzehn, exh. cat. Schleswig-Holsteinischen Kunstverein, Kunsthalle zu Kiel 2001, p. 119). The work, in this sense, also conjures the luminous silkscreen paintings of Andy Warhol, whose depictions of race riots and car crashes asked if mass circulation of images made us immune to the tragedies within them. Here, Richter affirms the power of paint to bring these stories to life: twenty years after its creation, the image continues to resonate globally.