Gerhard Richter Quotes

I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.

Art is the highest form of hope.

It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.

A lot of different things had to come together over the years, accumulated experiences of a general and personal nature, before the idea and the decision were developed and then carried out.

I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)

I want pictorial content without sentiment, but I want it as human as possible

Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.

My paintings are wiser than I am.

My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

The Atlas belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich - it's long since ceased to belong to me. Occasionally I run across it somewhere, and I think it's interesting because it looks different each time.

Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.

The year is always correct, also the month, only the day can be another. But that occurs to me only in the moment of writing it down.

Art shows us how to see things that are constructive and good, and to be an active part of that.

I choose depending on the way I feel; randomly, in other words. When I haven't done anything for a long time, I always start small, on paper.

Family photos, pictures of groups, those are truely wonderful. And they are just as good as the old masters, just as rich and just as beautifully composed (what does that mean anyway).

How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread.

With a brush you have control. The paint goes on the brush and you make the mark. From experience you know exactly what will happen. With the squeegee you lose control.

I don't believe in the reality of painting, so I use different styles like clothes: it's a way to disguise myself.

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.

Art is always to a large extent about need, despair and hopelessness.

Painting is another form of thinking.

I believe that the quintessential task of every painter in any time has been to concentrate on the essential.

I pursue no intentions, no directions; I have no program, no style and no mission.

I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.

If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

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.

Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.

Art should be serious, not a joke. I dont like to laugh about art.

To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.

Throwaway snapshots come closest to achieving the state of pure picture.

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.

My landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful'.

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.

To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

I am ridiculously old-fashioned.

I go to the studio every day, but I dont paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things.

I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.

I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false

I believe that he knew more what he was doing. I might be absolutely wrong about this, but that was my impression.

When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war.

I never worked at painting as if it were a job; it was always out of interest or for fun, a desire to try something.

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.

Painting pictures is simply the official, the daily work, the profession, and in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits.

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.

Well, I don't believe there are subjects that can't be painted, but there are a lot of things that I personally can't paint.

Art is the ideal medium for making contact with the transcendental, or at least for getting close to it.