Daniel Richter - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

  • Exhibited

    Düsseldorf, K21 Kunstmuseum Nordheim-Westfalen, Daniel Richter: Grünspan , October 12, 2002 – January 19, 2003

  • Literature

    J. Heynen, and F. Kramer, eds., Daniel Richter: Grünspan, Bielefeld/Düsseldorf, 2002, no. 19, p. 79 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay


    The inherent qualities of oil paint provide for infinite possibilities. It is a
    sensual and complex world of pigments, thickness, texture and illusion.
    Paint is something scientific and something you feel. Daniel Richter’s
    Grünspan (fertig ist die möhre), painted in 2002, employs an adept method
    of exploiting color in oil enriching the layers of motion, which are built by
    layers of paint.This astute and distinct synthesis is dually defined through
    both his manipulation of the medium and its symbolic capacity. Richter’s
    Grünspan series employs visual concepts nascent within verdigris, a
    common name for a compound formed when copper, brass or bronze
    is weathered and oxidizes, generating an acidic and vibrant green. Until the
    19th century, it was often used as a pigment in oil paint. Verdigris’s unusual
    lightfastness created a specific need for the pigment to be carefully
    prepared, layered and immediately sealed with varnish. Its initial blue-green
    hue then becomes a stable and more earthly green.
    “Richter’s Pictorial Spaces do not replicate the world we love in or the
    images that we have of it, because they don’t adopt the usual, dominant
    gaze.They resist rational notions of space and traditional aesthetics alike.
    All the hints at a third dimension only intensify the feeling that the more
    one purses the illusion of abstract geometric perfection the less room for
    maneuver there is, and the more clearly the setting proves to be a heterotopia,
    a place where a very different order applies.These so-called abstract
    paintings are filled with just such tiny elements of movements. Indeed,
    faced with their baroque, very consciously constructed layers of movement.
    One can soon be led astray by these minute particles, which counter the
    delirium, unleashed by the picture as a whole.With a material constant
    reality, however small and almost helpless it may be,” (J. Heynen, “Verdigris
    or Gold Dust,” Daniel Richter: Grünspan, 2002, p. 79).
    Richter cleverly hints at the long tradition of painting and great old masters
    while his own hand manipulates paint in intricate strokes for a modern era.
    The flight of songbirds circling around the open-mouthed, gaping expressions
    of the faceless human forms all call to mind the Medieval concept of death:
    it was believed that at the time the human body left the physical earth a
    bird escaped from the open mouths of the dead.Tense and looming in its
    mood, Grünspan (fertig ist die möhre) states its subsistence through this
    quirky, lurid, turbulent pigment and evocative symbols.

70

Grünspan (fertig ist die möhre), [Verdigris (the carrot is finished)]

2002
Oil and lacquer on canvas.
113 1/2 x 116 in. (288.3 x 294.6 cm).

Signed and dated “Daniel Richter 2002” lower left.

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $481,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York