22 June – 29 July 2017

Our Paris Marais gallery presented Le Freak, an exhibition of new works by Daniel Richter, on 22 June 2017. The exhibition coincided with a retrospective of his work, shown successively at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark, the 21er Haus Museum of Contemporary Art in the Vienna Belvedere, and opened on 1 July at the Camden Arts Centre in London.

Daniel Richter's new group of works, Le Freak, was a continuation of the series Hello, I love you (2015/16, Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt), which constituted a radical departure from the artist’s style of the last decade: ‘I wanted to get away from a certain kind of narration and from the theatre stage and from the burden of already knowing what I’m about to do’, Daniel Richter stated last year.

In these paintings the figures and forms were more defined and explicit than in the 2015/16 series, yet they maintained a sense of abstraction, which is reinforced by the background’s subtle gradations of colour: ‘It’s an almost logical step which involves just having straight lines in the background that shape this fake horizon as in a "sublime" landscape painting. […] and then it has elements that drift, because I wanted to be somewhere between extreme backward and extreme forward movement’, Daniel Richter said in conversation with Poul Erik Tojner.