Das Auge War Kaputt (The Eye Was Broken)

Painted in 2011, Daniel Richter’s large-scale Das Auge war kaputt (The eye was broken) presents a psychedelic landscape of lurid intensity. Liquid pours of neon green, hot pink and bright red meld into a thrilling terrestrial expanse, while lightning vibrations in black and blue outline mountainous peaks and steep valleys. Two shadowy figures race across this eerie terrain, each carrying blurry weapons. Their eyes are spectral and unearthly, four glowing green orbs that shine brightly in this darkened world. Describing Richter’s figuration, critic Daniel Baird said, ‘Richter’s array of characters—giants, clowns, circus animals, ghouls—in some ways evoke the savage and mocking allegories Max Beckmann painted in exile in the 1940s. But for all their apocalyptic pitch, Richter’s paintings remain slippery and enigmatic: they are embodiments of confused states of being, which the carefully spattered and glazed layers of acidic colour make both beautiful and nasty’ (D. Baird, ‘Daniel Richter’, The Brooklyn Rail, 1 June 2004). Richter’s twenties were set against the backdrop of Hamburg’s squat scene of the 1980s, during which he created album art for punk bands. Indeed, punk’s reliance on sonic distortion and vocal aggression is evident in the artist’s paintings, which loudly and fervently confront the viewer. These are strange worlds that exist within an ‘unresolvable zone between industrial rave, squatter riot, idle fantasy, global fear, drugged hallucination, and absurdist violence’ (D. Baird, ‘Daniel Richter’, The Brooklyn Rail, 1 June 2004). Certainly, Das Auge war kaputt is an unknowable land, where clouds drip, mountains shimmer, and blackened figures dissolve into light.