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拍品專文
Painted in 2014, and acquired by the present owner the following year, The Goobugly is a gargantuan showcase of Daniel Richter’s unique vision. Lending its name to the artist’s 2014 retrospective Chromos goo bugly at the Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, it depicts a nightmarish yet vibrant gathering. A parade of dark, diaphanous figures dominates the foreground of the canvas, their ghoulish features partially concealed. Several hold batons, or wear boots and helmets; one reaches out towards a blue bird flown by a tiny skeleton rider. The group’s central member grins mischievously at the beholder. Above them Richter has conjured a crowd of fiery orange and green visages, which display fear, horror and anger. The colour contrast between the two congregations sharpens the painting’s drama, while also evoking the thermal imaging cameras used by police and military personnel. Gaps beneath the front rank of figures reveal a background spattered with propulsive, abstract drips and splatters, distancing the scene from a mimetic representation of reality.
The Goobugly collapses the name of Sergio Leone’s classic 1966 spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly into a single word, eliding the distinctions between these apparently clear moral categories. It is a climax in a series of works which began with The Owner’s History Lesson (2006-2007), all of which depict sinister crowds. Richter’s figures, writes Beate Ermacora, ‘never appear singularly, but are always part of anonymous gatherings, masked hordes that have formed mobs, fighting one another or involved in activities that should remain concealed’ (‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, in Daniel Richter: Chromos goo bugly, exh. cat., Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 2014, p. 76). These shrouded figures recall the distorted faces in the paintings and prints of Francisco de Goya and George Grosz. They also echo the grimacing promenaders of Edvard Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan (1892), whose mask-like countenances are as threatening as they are unknowable.
Richter began his career in the punk scene of pre-Reunification Hamburg, where he created posters, t-shirts and album covers. He transitioned into painting in the 1990s, studying under Werner Büttner and working as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. These two artists were leading adherents of the 1980s ‘Junge Wilde’ movement, which eschewed the artistic convention of the time in favour of intense colours, broad brushstrokes and eclectic borrowings from art history. Richter builds on this mode, as well as on his mentors’ desire to constantly stake out new visual territories. His earliest works were abstractions, but he developed his unique figurative style after a 2000 trip to Paris. He soon won acclaim for a series of large-scale paintings that made a case for the potential for art to convey sociopolitical ideas, without ever directly portraying historical or contemporary events. As vivid as it is enigmatic, The Goobugly masterfully extends this practice into the realm of phantasmagoria.
The Goobugly collapses the name of Sergio Leone’s classic 1966 spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly into a single word, eliding the distinctions between these apparently clear moral categories. It is a climax in a series of works which began with The Owner’s History Lesson (2006-2007), all of which depict sinister crowds. Richter’s figures, writes Beate Ermacora, ‘never appear singularly, but are always part of anonymous gatherings, masked hordes that have formed mobs, fighting one another or involved in activities that should remain concealed’ (‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, in Daniel Richter: Chromos goo bugly, exh. cat., Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 2014, p. 76). These shrouded figures recall the distorted faces in the paintings and prints of Francisco de Goya and George Grosz. They also echo the grimacing promenaders of Edvard Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan (1892), whose mask-like countenances are as threatening as they are unknowable.
Richter began his career in the punk scene of pre-Reunification Hamburg, where he created posters, t-shirts and album covers. He transitioned into painting in the 1990s, studying under Werner Büttner and working as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. These two artists were leading adherents of the 1980s ‘Junge Wilde’ movement, which eschewed the artistic convention of the time in favour of intense colours, broad brushstrokes and eclectic borrowings from art history. Richter builds on this mode, as well as on his mentors’ desire to constantly stake out new visual territories. His earliest works were abstractions, but he developed his unique figurative style after a 2000 trip to Paris. He soon won acclaim for a series of large-scale paintings that made a case for the potential for art to convey sociopolitical ideas, without ever directly portraying historical or contemporary events. As vivid as it is enigmatic, The Goobugly masterfully extends this practice into the realm of phantasmagoria.