Daniel Richter (German, born in 1962) started his artistic path only in his 30s after a period of political activism in the rebellious left underground and squad movement. Always obsessed with images, history, and progress, Richter was first looking for vitality and absolute freedom, thinking he would find it in non-figurative painting, which has an ability for reinventing itself time and again. In the 2000s, Richter, perpetually looking for the new, created a different, strong figurative body of work depicting scenes of conflicts or socio-political events in pulsating, dazzling colors. Now, Richter works in the territory between representational and non-representational art, experimenting with color, lines, and composition while blurring the distinction between abstraction and figuration.

Licht ohne Trost (Light without Comfort, 2021) shows two figures that Richter placed against a clean, white and blue abstract background with a geometrically fixed horizon line. The original inspiration for this work, and the whole series Furor I, to which the painting belongs, was a found postcard from the First World War, made in 1916 and depicting wounded soldiers on crutches, some of them with missing legs. Richter recreated these limping figures – recognizable as soldiers thanks to their uniform berets – as colorful fragmented bodies, and used their crutches as identifiable elements in the scene, but also as diagonal lines that grant the scene vivacity and energy. Strong color contrasts between green, blue, red, and yellow make it a very vibrant image, uncomfortably confronting the viewer with the difficult subject of suffering, loss, and collective trauma.