Daniel Richter @ Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg - "Mit elben Birnen" Exhibition

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg

Through 27 September 2025

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents a new series of paintings by German artist DANIEL RICHTER. Created over the past year, these large-scale works navigate a space between figuration and abstraction, characterised by chaotic entanglements of fragmented bodies. Creature-like forms are depicted against jagged fields of colour in bright, contrasting tones, evoking a sense of rebellious energy and electric vibrancy.

Daniel Richter’s painting has been marked by a continual formal transformation since the beginning of his career. While opaque, monochrome areas of colour characterised Richter’s work of the past few years, the backgrounds of these new, intensely colourful compositions appear torn or singed. At times, the candy-coloured shapes that seem to race across the canvas are delineated by black, dense lines; at others, they seem to detach from the background or erupt across the pictorial space.

In some works, the artist leaves behind traces of his physical presence as visible fingermarks on the canvas, intensifying a heightened sense of primordial energy and unresolved conflict. ‘The dynamic in my work is mainly based on pushing and shoving, or on elements that are being confronted by each other – mingling, pushing, pulling,’ Daniel Richter explains.

The temporal and spatial indeterminacy of scenes refuses to resolve into a coherent time, place, or even pictorial space. The works appear to depict surreal landscapes of the mind or imagination rather than representations of any external world. Colours clash or recede with intense emotional charge, the bold contrasts and abstract patterns recalling the formal vocabulary of Clyfford Still. And yet, despite the underlying violence, the works convey a touching sensuality and beauty that counterbalances their restless energy.

The exhibition’s title references the opening line of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Half of Life, which Daniel Richter cryptically rephrases. The poem is centred around a stark contrast between idealised beauty and a world marked by emptiness. The lines, which sound almost prophetic in today’s political climate, accompanied Daniel Richter during the creation of this series. Hölderlin’s image of creaking weathervanes can be read as a symbol of the fragile, often fractured order of our time.

Friedrich Hölderlin

‘Half of Life’

With its yellow pears

And wild roses everywhere

The shore hangs into the lake,

O gracious swans,

And drunk with kisses

You dip your heads

In the sobering holy water.

Ah, where will I find

Flowers, come winter,

And where the sunshine

And shade of the earth?

Walls stand cold

And speechless, in the wind

The weathervanes creak.

The anarchic humour of his titles is typical of the artist, whose sensibility for the absurd and the drastic is also closely linked to the Hamburg music scene and punk. The city, where Daniel Richter studied under Werner Büttner from 1992 to 1996, has played a pivotal role in his life and career, serving as both a formative backdrop for his artistic development and a long-standing base from which he emerged as one of Germany’s most influential contemporary painters.

Artist Daniel Richter

Born in Eutin, Germany, Daniel Richter lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1992–96 under Werner Büttner, and later worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Richter’s work have been held at Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023); Space K, Seoul (2022); 21er Haus, Vienna (2017); Camden Arts Centre, London (2017); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2016); TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2014); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2011); CAC Málaga and Denver Art Museum (both 2008); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2007); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005); and Kunsthalle Kiel; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2001).

Daniel Richter’s works are included in renowned collections worldwide, among them the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig; the Kunstmuseum Den Haag; the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg. In 2023, the Oscar-winning director Pepe Danquart released the documentary Daniel Richter, offering a multifaceted insight into the artist’s life and work.

In December, a major retrospective will open at the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Schloss Gottorf (until February 2026).

THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG

Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg

ropac.net

Related Posts:

In English

Daniel Richter 

Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023)

Daniel Richter: Pink Flag – White Horse 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005)

En Français

Daniel Richter. Drapeau rose – Cheval blanc

Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (2005)

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, 25 July — 27 September 2025

Yan Pei-Ming @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg - Against the Light

Yan Pei-Ming: Against the Light

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg

Through 23 december 2020

Yan Pei-Ming’s new series of works explore the complexities of current global developments and their multilayered impact, on a societal as well as a personal and emotional level. While in recent years Yan Pei-Ming’s practice has been characterised by his engagement with the works and legacies of other painters, including Gustave Courbet, this exhibition marks the artist’s return to the self. Created during the last few months, the self-portraits and still-lifes of this exhibition are pervaded by feelings of constriction and solitude experienced during the artist's confinement. In these diverse paintings, Yan Pei-Ming examines the unprecedented inner conflicts of the present moment in an intimate and piercingly direct way. 

 

Deeply rooted in the tradition of European painting, Yan Pei-Ming’s works are interrelated by their shared preoccupation with the passing of time. The key themes of his paintings have long concerned history or the history of art and classical pictorial themes remain prevalent in this new series. Yan Pei-Ming’s still-lifes depicting skulls are reminiscent of vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, but also of modernist artists like Paul Cezanne. The works evoke established iconographic connotations such as the transience and fragility of life, while also embodying a universal and very contemporary quality – a duality characteristic of the artist. Painted in a period of physical isolation, during which each day resembled the next, the passage of time gained a new dimension for the artist, prompting him to re-examine this classic theme for the first time in three decades. His subjects tread a line between traditional forms of representation and contemporary cultural relevance, inviting interpretation from a classical perspective as well as from the present moment. 

 

Yan Pei-Ming’s self-portraits document a certain turning point in the artist’s work. He has recently returned to this genre of painting, which was significant during the first stages of his artistic development, after avoiding it for over 30 years. 

I did my first self-portrait at the age of thirteen. As I had no model, I painted myself with the help of a mirror, without bothering anyone. [...] When I arrived in Europe, I made a trip to Amsterdam and saw Rembrandt's self-portraits. Since then, I haven't taken up the subject again. When you look at his self-portraits, you can see the passage of time. It's so extraordinary, it disturbed me. I said to myself: I'm going to think about it and I've been thinking about it for ten years. Yan Pei-Ming

The portraits show the artist from different angles, becoming a sustained reflection on his own image during the recent period of isolation. These works document his emotions at specific moments, like snapshots of his mental state, captured at different times of day and under different lighting conditions. In Self-portrait with Mask Yan Pei-Ming’s inquisitive and direct gaze, emphasised by the concealment of his lower face, captivates the viewer in a haunting way. The portrait visualises a key cultural moment – the ubiquity of the mask – while capturing emotions that are paradoxically as universal as they are isolated. 

 

A very personal retrospective with a focus on self-portraits, which opens at the Musée Unterlinden in 2021, will serve to further cement this inward turn in Yan Pei-Ming's practice.

GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC - VILLA KAST

Mirabellplatz 2, A-5020 Salzburg

www.ropac.net

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Irving Penn @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg - Still Life

Irving Penn: Still Life
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg
Through 16 July 2019

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents the exhibition Still Life by American photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009), devoted to his still lifes, including the well-known series Street Material, Cigarettes and Flowers. The exhibition features over 30 photographs taken in New York over six decades for publications such as Vogue, as well as on his travels. Irving Penn created some of the most memorable still lifes of our time, and his innovative portraits, still lifes, fashion and beauty photographs made his reputation as one of the most high-profile and influential photographers of the 20th century.

Irving Penn began his career as a photographer in 1943 at the suggestion and with the encouragement of Alexander Liberman, then art director of US Vogue. The same year, one of Irving Penn’s colour photographs for Vogue appeared on the cover of their October issue, showing the first photographic still life in the magazine's recent history. In the ensuing 60 years, he took more than 150 cover photographs for Vogue and produced pioneering editorials, which became known for their natural lighting and formal simplicity, making him the leading photographer in the field. At a time when photography was understood primarily as a means of communication, Irving Penn approached it with an artist's eye, expanding its creative potential in both his professional and his personal work. 

Many of Irving Penn's still lifes combine food with everyday objects. He staged laid tables with exquisite arrangements of dishes, fruit and vessels, reminiscent of the Dutch masters of the Golden Age like Willem Kalf or Pieter Claesz. A cut-open watermelon, a crumpled linen table-napkin, a broken-off piece of baguette or a fly sitting on ripe fruit relate to the transience symbolised in vanitas paintings and emphasise the absence of the human being. The choice of subjects and the context of the objects also call to mind Georges Braque's early Cubist pictures. 

"The extreme deliberateness of these still-life arrangements – far from the traditional mock simplicity of a few pieces of fruit, a few flowers – adds to the sense that the objects are codes, that they carry a message even beyond the one the title announces" (Adam Kirsch, 2017).

The individual states of decay illustrated in the Cigarettes photographs show an interesting correlation with human characteristics, and may also be interpreted as memento mori. Irving Penn's first solo exhibition at MoMA in New York took place in 1975 and featured exclusively the Cigarettes series, which was perceived as a provocation and contrast to his popular earlier fashion photographs. Irving Penn’s interest in the theme led him to photograph other litter he found in the street, such as flattened paper cups or old playing-cards. Through his lens, street litter – which most people prefer to ignore – became something fascinating, almost iconic, however, while simultaneously expressing an explicit consumer criticism through them. 

Irving Penn composed his still-life photographs like a painter, working with large-format cameras, and was tireless in his attempts to expand the creative possibilities of the medium. He was deeply involved in each stage, from the meticulous composition of the picture to making his own prints. Unlike most other art photographers, he experimented with platinum-palladium and silver gelatin prints in order to lend each of his works a distinctive texture and original character. With his unique signature and stringently reduced aesthetic, he remains a defining stylistic influence, an inspiration to countless successors. 

In 2017, to mark the centenary of his birth, a comprehensive retrospective entitled Centennial was held at the Grand Palais in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the C/O Berlin. The exhibition consisted of some 240 works, including an extensive presentation of his diverse still lifes, some of which are shown in the Salzburg exhibition. Irving Penn's photographs have been displayed in many exhibitions worldwide, including Irving Penn: Underfoot at The Art Institute of Chicago (2013), Irving Penn: Diverse World at the Moderna Museet/Malmö (2012, and subsequently at the Kumu Art Museum/Tallinn), Irving Penn: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery/London (2010) and Irving Penn: Small Trades at the J. Paul Getty Museum/Los Angeles (2009-2010).

Irving Penn's works are represented in distinguished private and public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Maison Européenne de la Photographie/Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art/New York, Moderna Museet/Stockholm, Morgan Library and Museum/New York, Museum of Modern Art/New York and the National Gallery of Art/Washington DC.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has represented The Irving Penn Foundation, in collaboration with the Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, since September 2017.

GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG
Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg
www.ropac.net

Cory Arcangel @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg - Verticals

Cory Arcangel: Verticals
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg
27 January - 16 March 2019

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac presents Verticals, an exhibition of works by American artist Cory Arcangel with a focus on his new series of 14 Scanner Paintings. These new works are shown together with a number of drawings, a laser animation, two video sculptures referring to Nam June Paik's TV Buddha and a new minimalist sound installation. 

A pioneer of technology-based art, Cory Arcangel works in a wide variety of media, including music composition, video, modified video games, performance and the Internet. The ease with which he recognises how to use software, hardware and Internet resources as raw artistic material, placing them in new contexts, reveals a new kind of style. The ageing process of technologies is always a central question in his oeuvre.

The Scanner Paintings, a series conceived since 2010, are based on commercially available textiles, which are scanned, inscribed with the artist's signature and printed with UV ink on IKEA LINNMON table-tops. They show various types of leggings – sweatpants, track pants, Daisy Dukes and ripped denims. In each work, details such as waistband, pockets, zips and logos are combined, usually collage-like, on two boards hanging one above the other. Overlapping letters create word-plays and new meanings, or the logo is legible only by force of the branding typography. Independently of changing fashions, the sports labels are part of a contemporary pop culture and a collective memory to which the artist refers.

Cory Arcangel's almost abstract laser animation Dunk takes the form of a stylised basketball player from an NBA video game throwing a ball into the basket. The artist drew the animation by hand into a computer using a Wacom tablet. It is projected onto the wall using a Kvant Laser Clubmax 800. Cory Arcangel sees the Slam Dunk as a typically American phenomenon that illustrates America's current role in the world – requiring only brute height and strength, rather than ball-handling skills or finesse.

The Original and Season 6 are videos made in real-time with the aid of baby monitors. In the first of the two video sculptures, the digital video baby monitor is directed at a plastic mannequin's head wearing a structured man's hat from Ping Men's Tour and Oakley Men's OO9154 Half Jacket XL 2.0 golf sunglasses. The other baby monitor is directed at a Yeezy Season 6 crepe slide slipper on an acrylic display stand. The displays echo Nam June Paik's legendary TV Buddha (1974), in reverse: the object is being observed, and baby monitors are surveillance devices.

"I studied music, and discovered John Cage, Nam June Paik and Karlheinz Stockhausen. My works often refer to art history, particularly to Paik. A few years ago, I saw his closed-circuit video installation TV Buddha in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. At the time, I'd already had the idea for an installation with two computers continuously sending each other mails with an automatic out-of-office message." (Cory Arcangel)

Sonic Attack consists of a speaker and a data visual system directed at the doorway, to register people entering the gallery, emitting the typical ping sound as though it came from their pocket, causing them to think they have received a message on their iPhone.

The exhibition also presents a series of seven works on paper. The abstract drawings were made by dripping triple-concentrate espresso onto the paper and tilted to produce modernist patterns.

Verticals is Cory Arcangel's sixth solo exhibition in the Salzburg and Paris galleries since the start of our collaboration in 2004. In addition, musical performances were initiated, such as in 2015 with the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Pantin, and in the Eglise Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement during the FIAC 2018.

  

Cory Arcangel was born in Buffalo (NY) in 1978. After living in New York for 15 years, he moved to Stavanger, Norway, in 2018, but he still has a studio in Brooklyn. His unique artistic approach is based on his training in classical guitar and his studies in music technology at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio in the late 1990s, which coincided with the beginning of the digital revolution and inspired him to become an artist, composer, programmer and entrepreneur. In 2014, he founded a software and merchandise company under the imprint Arcangel Surfware, stocking T-shirts, sweatpants, bed-sheets and iPhone cases – things needed for surfing the Internet. His first flagship store opened in Stavanger in September 2018. 

Cory Arcangel is the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to hold a solo exhibition (2011) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition Asymmetrical Response, in collaboration with Olia Lialina, toured in 2016/2017 through the art spaces Western Front, Vancouver, to The Kitchen, New York, and Art Projects, Ibiza. Solo exhibitions have been held in distinguished international museums and institutions, including the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy (2015), Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland (2015), Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark (2014), Fondation DHC/ART Montreal, Canada (2013), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA (2012), Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK (2011), Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2010) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, USA (2010).

GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG
Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg
www.ropac.net

William Kentridge @ Whithechapel Gallery, London - Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek - Museum der Moderne Kunst Salzburg

William Kentridge: Thick Time
Whithechapel Gallery, London
21 September 2016 - 15 January 2017
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
16 February – 18 June 2017
Museum der Moderne Kunst Salzburg
22 July – 5 November 2017
The Whitworth, University of Manchester, 2018

Whitechapel Gallery presents a major exhibition of work by William Kentridge from 21 September 2016 to 15 January 2017. The exhibition titled Thick Time is curated by Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery Director and will be the artist’s first major public solo presentation in the UK in over 15 years.

William Kentridge (b.1955, Johannesburg) is one of South Africa’s pre-eminent artists, globally acclaimed for his drawings, films, lecture performances and opera and theatre productions. His work draws on varied sources, including philosophy, literature and early cinema to create intricate art works and spellbinding environments in which he explores theories of time and relativity, the history of colonialism and the aspirations and failures of revolutionary politics.

William Kentridge: Thick Time will feature six works created between 2003 and 2016 – including two of the artist’s immersive audio-visual installations, The Refusal of Time (2012) and O Sentimental Machine (2003), which have never previously been exhibited in the UK. The exhibition will also feature his flip-book film, Second-hand Reading (2013), a series of mural-scale tapestries based on his opera production of Shostakovich’s The Nose and a set model which reveals his working process on the opera production Lulu (2016), which he will direct at English National Opera this November.

The Refusal of Time (2012) is an all-enveloping, multi-sensory installation that explores the transformation of time into material objects, sound, images and mechanics. Inspired by a series of conversations between Kentridge and American scientist Peter Galison around theories of time, the work is an extraordinary synthesis of moving images, sound and performance. A breathing sculpture or ‘elephant’ at its heart is based on 19th century attempts to measure and control time during the industrial revolution and high point of European colonial expansion. First shown at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, The Refusal of Time is a collaboration between the artist with composer Philip Miller, projection designer and editor Catherine Meyburgh, and Peter Galison, a scientist from the United States.

The exhibition concludes with O Sentimental Machine (2015), originally commissioned for SALTWATER, 14th Istanbul Biennial, where it was installed in one of Istanbul’s oldest hotels, the Hotel Splendid Palas. In a critique of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s notion that people are ‘sentimental but programmable machines’, subtitled videos of speeches by Trotsky and also his time in exile in Istanbul are projected on to glass doors on either side of the installation, offering the viewer the opportunity to observe what is going on behind the closed doors.

William Kentridge: Thick Time is co-curated by Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery Director and Sabine Breitwieser, Director, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and is organised with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (16 February – 18 June 2017), Museum der Moderne Kunst Salzburg (22 July – 5 November 2017) and the Whitworth, University of Manchester in 2018.

Publication : The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication which will include new critical writings on each of the works in the exhibition by curators and thinkers including Homi K. Bhabha, Joseph Leo Koerner and William Kentridge himself, alongside the artist’s chronology and bibliography. £24.99.

Whitechapel Gallery
www.whitechapelgallery.org