Approaching Notes from Above

Daniel Richter and Music

Twenty-five images from the complete works of the painter Daniel Richter will provide visual accompaniment to the major concerts of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra during the 2026/2027 season – in this brochure, on posters and in the programmes. Dr. Eva Meyer-Hermann, curator and author (Daniel Richter: Bilder von früh bis heute, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin 2023), introduces the artist to us.

Daniel Richter’s paintings have always been intense. In his early abstract works swathes of oil paint and enamel cover the canvas; technoid structures and psychedelic patterns interweave. The paint is willful, it rebels. It has to be pushed, layered, smeared until the surface yields. The final outcome is overwhelming.

Around the year 2000 Richter turned to figuration. Four large “Deutschlandbilder“ (Germany Pictures) portray scenarios on a political and existential knife-edge. The focus is on conditions, not on events, as in Zurberes, where Berlin’s Alexanderplatz is a weary place without promise—a grotesque gateway to Hell, where the myth of Cerberus stumbles into our own time. Meanwhile people appear in smaller picture formats: falling, endangered, akin to animals, yet sustained by the artist’s quiet empathy. More recently, expansive body-landscapes have emerged from under the artist’s spatula, constrained by powerful lines. They don't tell stories: they create unrelieved tension.

Before Richter (born in 1962) studied painting in the early 1990s, he had been active in the squatting/anti-Fascist scene in Hamburg; music was his world, his sound chamber. He designed album covers, posters, and fliers. Nowadays Richter lives in Berlin and in Vienna, where he teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts.

In his studio there is always music playing, creating a beat, filling the room with energy, from Hip Hop to classical.

Music permeates Richter’s work. In his studio—with a rich array of books representing narrative and intellectual order—there is always music playing, creating a beat, filling the room with energy, from Hip Hop to classical. Many of his picture titles allude to music or music history, as in 1937, berechtigte Kritik [Legitimate Criticism], which recalls the attack on Dmitri Shostakovich in the state newspaper Pravda that made him fear for his life. Other titles cite, twist, or parody song titles and concepts, as in Ferbenlaare (“Farbenlehre” = “color theory”). These mutations go beyond witty jokes: they are on the cusp between pathos and irony. One word is enough to determine the mode.

Painting and music have often been linked. In his color sphere treatise the Early Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge compared the interplay of colors to musical harmonies. Eugène Delacroix talked of the musical effect of color. Wassily Kandinsky spoke of colors as internal sounds, which ultimately led him to abstract painting. Music is less about actions than mood. Figurations and conflicts are resolved in sound. Even in the face of tragedy, music still has momentum. Similarly, in Richter’s paintings nothing rigidifies, things continue to resonate, like music. Political issues set the tone—there’s no need for slogans.

In singing the ideal is to approach the note from above—not to strain upwards—so that it reverberates in the air around it. Even at their most urgent, Richter’s paintings avoid fortissimos. A note sounds out and the painting grows from it, forever resonant. We come to a halt at each one and listen with our eyes. 

Eva Meyer-Hermann / Translated from the German by Fiona Elliott