In 1992, at the age of 30, German artist Daniel Richter went from designing album covers and show posters for punk bands to attending Hamburg’s College of Fine Arts, where he developed an encyclopedic knowledge of art history.

Richter, who works sans-assistants in an old post office in Mitte, began to see enormous success when, after 1995, his large historic and politically inspired oil-on-canvas paintings morphed from being utterly abstract to employing colorful figuration.

See new works by the artist at Berlin’s Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery, on display until August.