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Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter Quotes

Visual Artist

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Famous Gerhard Richter Quotes

“Painting is my profession, because it has always been the thing that interested me most. I'm of a certain age, I come from a different tradition and, in any case, I can't do anything else. I'm still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.”

HumansStillsI CanDifferentAgeCertainCasesPaintingSingingCapacityTraditionDancingProfessionMake SenseHuman Capacity
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture or even knowing what such a thing ought to look like. But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere, it might one day happen. And this hope is nurtured every time something appears, a scattered, partial, initial hint of something which reminds me of what I long for, or which conveys a hint of it – although often enough I have been fooled by a momentary glimpse that then vanishes, leaving behind only the usual thing.”

IfsLooksLongHas BeensEnoughMightHappensCoursesMy OwnBehindsKnowingPaintingOughtOne DayDespairLeavingUsualGlimpseImpossibilityInitialsPersevereHintsFooledMomentaryIncapacityAccomplishing Anything
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“Painting is the making of an analogy for something non-visual and incomprehensible - giving it form and bringing it within reach. And that is why good paintings are incomprehensible. Creating the incomprehensible has absolutely nothing to do with turning out any old bunkum, because bunkum is always comprehensible.”

GivingFormPaintingCreatingVisualsAbsolutely NothingAnalogiesWithin Reach
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“The painter sees the semblance of things and repeats it. That is, without fabricating the things himself, he fabricates their semblance; and, if that no longer recalls any object, this artificially produced semblance functions only because it is scrutinized for likeness to a familiar - that is, object-related - semblance.”

IfsObjectsPaintingFunctionFamiliarPainterRelatedRepeatsRecallsSemblanceFabricate
Book:Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007
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“Painting is traditional but for me that doesn't mean the academy. I felt a need to paint; I love painting. It was something natural - as is listening to music or playing an instrument for some people. For this reason I searched for themes of my era and my generation. Photography offered this, so I chose it as a medium for painting.”

PeopleNeedsMeanReasonFeltNaturalGenerationsPaintingListeningPhotographyInstrumentsPaintTraditionalMediumsErasThemeListening To MusicAcademyMy Generation
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“But I have a problem with the term 'light'. I never in my life knew what to do with that. I know that people have mentioned on some occasions that 'Richter is all about light', and that 'the paintings have a special light', and I never knew what they were talking about. I was never interested in light. Light is there and you turn it on or you turn it off, with sun or without sun. I don't know what the 'problematic of light' is. I take it as a metaphor for a different quality, which is similarly difficult to describe. Good.”

PeopleKnowsDifferentProblemLightTurnsDifficultTermQualityTalkingSunSpecialPaintingMetaphorBe GoodOccasions
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“I was a student, and as such you generally rely on prior models of how to make art, but these were not satisfying. Then I discovered in photos what had been missing in paintings; namely that they make a terrific variety of statements and have great substance. That is what I wanted to convey to paintings and apply to it.”

ArtWantedMissingStudentsPaintingModelsTechniqueStatementsVarietySubstanceRelySatisfyingTerrific
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“If, while I'm painting, I distort or destroy a motif, it is not a planned or conscious act, but rather it has a different justification: I see the motif, the way I painted it, is somehow ugly or unbearable. Then I try to follow my feelings and make it attractive. And that means a process of painting, changing or destroying - for however long it takes - until I think it has improved. And I don't demand an explanation from myself as to why this is so.”

IfsThinkingWayTryingMeanLongArtDifferentFeelingsProcessPaintingDemandConsciousUglyTechniqueAttractiveExplanationDestroyingJustificationUnbearableMotifs
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“Contact with like-minded painters - a group means a great deal to me: nothing comes in isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through. Shutting myself away in the country, for instance, would do nothing for me. One depends on one's surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists - and especially the collaboration with Lueg and Polke - matters a lot to me: it is part of the input that I need.”

NeedsMeanArtIdeasCountryMatterArtistDealsTalkingGroupsPaintingDependsContactPainterInstanceIsolationCollaborationSurroundingsInput
Book:Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007
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“The truth... When they have a similar structure to and are organized in as truthful a way as nature. When I look out of the window, then truth for me is the way nature shows itself in its various tones, colours and proportions. That's a truth and has its own correctness. This little slice of nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for my paintings.”

WayLooksLittlesArtFactsShowsGivenChallengesPiecesPaintingModelsWindowStructureVariousToneOrganizedColourProportionTruthfulOngoingCorrectness
Book:Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007
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“Illusion - or rather appearance, semblance - is the theme of my life (could be theme of speech welcoming freshmen to the Academy). All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible.”

ArtLightSeemsPaintingSpeechIllusionAppearanceWelcomePerceiveThemeVisibleAcademyFreshmanSemblance
Book:Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007
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“The urge to break with a tradition is only appropriate when you're dealing with an outdated, troublesome tradition: I never really thought about that because I take the old-fashioned approach of equating tradition with value (which may be a failing). But whatever the case, positive tradition can also provoke opposition if it's too powerful, too overwhelming, too demanding. That would basically be about the human side of wanting to hold your own.”

IfsHumansMayArtValuesSidesPowerfulBreakCasesFailingPaintingApproachTraditionOppositionAppropriateUrgesOverwhelmingProvokingOld FashionedTroublesomeOutdated
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“I didn't actually know what the protesters in the West really wanted. It was fantastic here, so much freedom, and that was what they were calling musty, middle-class, and fascistic, a bleak period. Bleak was what the GDR was, and it alone had adopted, almost unchanged, Nazi Germany's methods of intimidation and ideas about propaganda and the use of force.”

KnowsArtIdeasUseWantedForceClassMiddlePaintingPeriodsCallingMethodWestFantasticPropagandaGermanyMiddle ClassNaziAdoptedIntimidationBleakNazi GermanyUse Of Force
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“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.”

ThinkingWantTryingArtRealityRealizingSeeingPaintingWorks Of Art
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“But I would like to reach the point where I could cut up an illustrated magazine at random and see to it that the parts would each become a painting. I cannot properly explain it right now. Already now I am searching for the most boring and irrelevant photo material that I can find. And I would like to get to the point soon where this determined irrelevance could be retained, in favor of something that would be covered up otherwise by artifice.”

I CanWould BeCuttingPaintingMaterialsRight NowPhotographyBoringDeterminedFavorsMagazinesCoveredIrrelevantArtificeIrrelevanceCovered Up
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.”

WayFirstsMeanArtUseShowsWantedViewsSawsStylePaintingPureJudgmentPhotographyFirst TimeConventionalNew WaysCompositionCriteriaPersonal Experiences
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture - no matter whether good or bad. That's all the theory. It's no good. I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it's really good - better than anything I could ever say on the subject.”

MatterProblemRealitySubjectsPaintingTheoryPhotographyHundredPaintPhotographYieldCents
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“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.”

WayTryingWellsArtActionTurnsChoicesSocialKnownIssuesSubjectsPaintingNegativeTouchedAestheticWell KnownExplicitTrademarks
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“The first colour charts were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples. They were still related to Pop Art. In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions.”

FirstsArtStillsGivenChanceNumbersFourPaintingPopsChosenDefinedRelatedToneColourProportionArbitraryVariationSamplePop Art
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“Based on mixtures of the three primary colours, along with black and white, I come up with a certain number of possible colours and, by multiplying these by two or four, I obtain a definite number of colour fields that I multiply yet again by two, etc. But the complete realization of this project demands a great deal of time and work.”

ArtTwoCertainThreeBlackWhiteDealsNumbersFourFieldsPaintingDemandProjectsCome UpRealizationPrimariesColourEtcBlack And WhiteDefiniteMixturesMultiplying
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“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.”

MeanArtIdeasFormUsedCertainCoursesIndividualInformationPaintingBearsReflectionFunctionVisualsCollectivesInterpretationTranslationsIllustrationResemblancePictorial
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.”

WantArtFoundForceNumbersTreePaintingDeterminedFocusedContraryLandscapePerceiveCanvasLackingExactnessBlurry
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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