History is a nightmare
Daniel Richter’s Tarifa is both a dystopian nightmare and a scene that could have been pulled straight from recent front-page news. Women in headscarves and men, all hunkered low on an orange dinghy barely large enough to bear their weight, recall countless images of the ongoing refugee crisis.
Every breath you take
Light ripples across their huddled forms in unnatural, lurid colours: turquoise, pink, orange. Their eyes are stretched, scared hollows. Clearly, these are people who don’t want to be seen, but the suggestion of surveillance is menacing; it’s as if we’re watching through a night-vision camera.
Rip it up
Richter came of age in Hamburg’s leftwing squat scene of the 1980s, creating album artwork for punk bands. He turned to painting in the 90s when he worked as an assistant to one of German art’s fiercest radicals, Albert Oehlen. Since then, he’s constantly reinvented his approach, from abstraction to figurative works and painting without a brush.
Dark waters
Unlike his work September, which features an obvious representation of the twin towers, Tarifa is an emblematic image of suffering, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks about who these people are. The figures float, isolated within history, a black sea as unfathomable as the one depicted and one that threatens to engulf them at any moment.
Daniel Richter: Lonely Old Slogans, Camden Arts Centre, NW3, to 17 September
