Gerhard Richter Quotes
-
Perhaps the choice is a negative one, in that I was trying to avoid everything that touched on well-known issues - or any issues at all, whether painterly, social or aesthetic. I tried to find nothing too explicit, hence all the banal subjects; and then, again, I tried to avoid letting the banal turn into my issue and my trademark. So it's all evasive action, in a way.
→ -
Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make 'nothing' visible.
→ -
Not the victims of any specific ideology of the left or of the right, but of the ideological posture as such. This has to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail.
→ -
A student researching into my work has actually traced the newspapers and magazines where I found theses images and has found out that many of them illustrate a collection of gruesome stories, murders and suicides which contrast with the images used. There is a contrast between the message carried by the text and that suppressed by the illustration.
→ -
I am ridiculously old-fashioned.
→ -
They are specific places I have discovered here and there when I am on the road to take photos. I go especially to take photos.
→ -
Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.
→ -
When I make a representation of something, this, too, is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it.
→ -
I want pictorial content without sentiment, but I want it as human as possible
→ -
In truth, factual information - names or dates - have never interested me much. Those things are like an alien language that can interfere with the language of the painting, or even prevent its emergence.
→ -
Without form, communication stops... without form, you have everybody burbling on to themselves, whenever and however, things that no one else can understand and - rightly - no one else is interested in.
→ -
Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form, trust my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something. Even if that is only by being well organized. That too is form.
→ -
Cage is much more disciplined. He made chance a method and used it in constructive ways; I never did that. Everything here is a little more chaotic.
→ -
Painting is another form of thinking.
→ -
It was not possible for us to produce the same optimism and the same kind of humour or irony. Actually, it was not irony. Lichtenstein is not ironic but he does have a special kind of humour. That's how I could describe it: humour and optimism. For Polke and me, everything was more fragmented. But how it was broken up is hard to describe.
→ -
I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.
→ -
Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form; and the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context - which presupposes, of course, that words are used to convey information about the idea and the context. However, none of this means that pictures function as illustrations of an idea: ultimately, they are the idea. Nor is the verbal formulation of the idea a translation of the visual: it simply bears a certain resemblance to the meaning of the idea. It is an interpretation, literally a reflection.
→ -
The smudging makes the paintings a bit more complete. When they're not blurred, so many details seem wrong, and the whole thing is wrong too. Then smudging can help make the painting invincible, surreal, more enigmatic - that's how easy it is.
→ -
I remember that I felt I had to avoid all these sensational photos, the hanged woman, the man who shot himself, and so forth. I collected a great deal of material, including a number of banal, irrelevant photos, and then in the course of my work I came back to the very pictures I had actually wanted to avoid, which summed up the various stories.
→ -
When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals.
→ -
Of course, pictures of objects also have this transcendental side to them. Every object, being part of an ultimately incomprehensible world, also embodies that world; when represented in a picture, the object conveys this mystery all the more powerfully, the less of a 'function' the picture has. Hence, for instance, the growing fascination of many beautiful old portraits.
→ -
What counts isn't being able to do a thing, it's seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.
→ -
If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.
→ -
Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God. ... The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster.
→ -
I think everybody starts out by seeing a few works of art and wanting to do something like them. You want to understand what you see, what is there, and you try to make a picture out of it. Later you realize that you can't represent reality at all - that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.
→ -
My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.
→ -
Art is the ideal medium for making contact with the transcendental, or at least for getting close to it.
→ -
I do not mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing, but I am suspicious regarding the image of reality which our senses convey to us, and which is incomplete and limited. Our eyes have developed such as to survive. It is merely coincidence that we can see stars with them, as well.
→ -
Art should be serious, not a joke. I dont like to laugh about art.
→ -
It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.
→
Related Authors
-
David Hockney Photographer -
Luc Tuymans Artist -
Lucian Freud Painter -
Joseph Beuys Artist -
Pablo Picasso Painter -
Cindy Sherman Photographer -
Jasper Johns Artist -
Andy Warhol Artist -
Cy Twombly Painter -
Mark Rothko Artist -
Bruce Nauman Artist -
Willem de Kooning Artist -
Jackson Pollock Artist -
Jean-Michel Basquiat Artist -
Georg Baselitz Painter -
Jeff Koons Artist -
Sigmar Polke Painter -
Damien Hirst Artist -
Robert Rauschenberg Painter -
Anselm Kiefer Artist