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Gerhard Richter

98 quotes

“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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes, 1962; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art'
“Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes, 1962; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art'
“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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes, 1964; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects'
“Composition is a side issue. Its role in my selection of photographs is a negative one at best. By which I mean that the fascination of a photograph is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content. And, on the other hand, composition always also has its own fortuitous rightness.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes, 1964; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques'
“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques'
“As far as the surface is concerned – oil on canvas, conventionally applied – my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Photo-paintings'
“Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real – and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art'
“[question: How do you interpret your role as a painter in our society?] As a role that everyone has. 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. 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 prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from the interview with Rolf-Gunter Dienst, 1970; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art'
“This superficial blurring has something to do with the incapacity I have just mentioned. I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn't explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in an interview with Rolf Schön, 1972; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques'
“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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from Richter's letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann, February 1973; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects'
“When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over (about eight years ago), I did so because I did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful. As time went on, however, I observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces – and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of Richter on his 'Grey Paintings', in a letter to , 23 February 1975; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Grey-paintings'
“To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of Richter on his 'Grey Paintings', in a letter to , 23 February 1975; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Grey-paintings'
“To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing, what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.. .Painting is another form of thinking.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote, 1970's; from the documentary 'Gerhard Richter - Painting', Corrinna Belz, 2011
“Art is the highest form of hope.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art'
“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. Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Abstract paintings'
“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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes, 1985; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects'
“The 'Grey Pictures' were done at a time when there were monochrome paintings everywhere. I painted them nonetheless.. .Not Kelly, but Bob Ryman, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Yves Klein and many others.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloch, 1986
“The truth [is in his paintings].. .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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview with Christiane Vielhaber, 1986; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects'
“I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Anna Tilroe, 1987; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Abstract paintings'
“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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes, 1988; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art'
“I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. 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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from an interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Abstract paintings'
“But my motivation was more a matter of wanting to create order – to keep track of things. All those boxes full of photographs and sketches weigh you down, because they have something unfinished, incomplete, about them. So it's better to present the usable material in an orderly fashion and throw the other stuff away. That's how the Atlas came to be, and I exhibited it a few times.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of an interview with Stefan Koldehoff, 1999; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Atlas'
“In the beginning I tried to accommodate everything there that was somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away. After a while, some sheets in the Atlas acquired another value, after all – that is, it seemed to me that they could stand on their own terms, not only under the protection of the Atlas.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of an interview with Dieter Schwarz, 1999; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Atlas'
“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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in an interview with Astrid Kaspar, 2000; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques'
“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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of Richter from an interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, 2006; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects'
“By nature I am a skeptic. I don't dare to think my paintings are great. I can't understand the arrogance of someone saying, 'I have created a big, important work.' I want to reject this pathetic behavior, this notion of the heroic artist. Pollock, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, their heroism derived from the climate of their time, but we do not have this climate.. .On the other hand, you do need feelings like they had to some extent. So I am afraid there must be a side of me close to those feelings. Those absurd feelings.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My last wife [woman-artist Isa Genzken, he married in 1982 - they broke up in 1993] was very competitive, which was hard for both of us.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Idiots can do what I do. When I first started to do this [projecting photos on the canvas and painting them after having them traced in details with a piece of charcoal] in the 60's, people laughed. I clearly showed that I painted from photographs. It seemed so juvenile. The provocation was purely formal - that I was making paintings like photographs. Nobody asked about what was in the pictures. Nobody asked who my Aunt Marianne was. That didn't seem to be the point.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richter's aunt had been murdered by the Nazis in the name of euthanasia, a crime for which his father-in-law from his first marriage, a Nazi doctor named Heinrich Eufinger, had been partially responsible. Richter painte…
“I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. 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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My works are not just rhetorical, except in the sense that all art is rhetorical. I believe in beauty.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They [Richter always works on a number of his abstract paintings at the same time] feed off one another.. .At the beginning, I feel totally free, and it's fun, like being a child. The paintings can look good for a day or an hour. Over time, they change. In the end, you become like a chess player. It takes me longer than some people to recognize their quality, their situation - to realize when they are finished. Finally, one day I enter the room and say, 'Checkmate.' Then sometimes I need a break, a quiet job, like a landscape. But I always need to paint abstracts again. I need that pleasure.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can't say what they [his abstract paintings] are about. I don't think they are expressionistic. I don't know why people say that. Why not say they are like Chinese paintings or like batik? People also talk about the quality of light in the paintings. 'Ah, the light!' Or 'Ah, the space!' It's phony reverence. It's ridiculous.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is instinctive to search for something. Abstract art is inherently about the search - and about not finding anything. My gray monochromes have the same illusionistic implications as my landscapes. I want them to be seen as narratives - even if they are narratives of nothingness. Nothing is something. You might say they are like photographs of nothing.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In [19]'46, I had started to awaken to the world. At first, the Russians nationalized everything [in East-Germany / DDR]. Rich people had their property taken away, and the people got access to their libraries, which was wonderful for me. I read Hermann Hesse. Thomas Mann was a little too heavy for me. But Lombroso, Nietzsche. Materialists, I would call them – writers who said there was no god, no spirit, that freedom is an illusion. That affected me deeply.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But somewhere [during the 1950's, in East-Germany at the Art Academy] along the way we all began to notice that there was something wrong. We saw a few art magazines from the West and got a sense of another world. We began to talk about a third way between capitalism and Communism in art. I saw the work of graphic designers from Poland, the only ones [in communist area] I came across who seemed to be doing something for society but in a style that was more modern.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was called a formalist, and in East Germany that meant you could be denied a chance to exhibit. So I knew I had to leave [to West-Germany], not because I was worried about the controversy but because I knew the controversy was about a bad picture. It wasn't good enough to be controversial. I was getting all the wrong reactions. Friends said the work was wonderful, and the attacks made it seem more important than it was. I had started to earn money with the murals. I earned enough to get a car. That was a big deal. So it was not easy to give up. But I knew I had to leave.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lueg and Palermo saw what was good, what was bad, in what I was painting. That became the basis of our relationship, that we shared an idea, a sensibility. With Sigmar Polke, it was different. Our relationship was based on being outrageous. I have difficulties with his work. He [Polke] refuses all values and criteria, and for that reason I could never talk to him seriously. He refuses to accept any borders, any limits.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was already almost 30, and by then everyone was talking about the Americans. Picasso was irrelevant. He was history. I found myself in this deep pool, and there were all these figures swimming around, like Rauschenberg and Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein|Lichtenstein]]. I wanted to go where they were. Seeing Pollock and Fontana in Kassel had given me a sense of what it meant to be a modern artist and take risks, but it was a distant admiration because they were a different generation. This was my generation [on the art academy in Düsseldorf].”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So I started to paint like crazy, from figurative to abstract. Then after a year, I put it all on a bonfire in the courtyard of the academy. I suppose there was some ritual involved, but I didn't tell anyone before I did it, so it wasn't public, and I felt the work had to be burned because people were already taking things and paintings were starting to circulate. I had to prevent that because I realized it was time to start from scratch. Photographs were the way forward. I'm shocked now that the story seems clear, because it didn't seem clear at the time.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose they also had to do with my father, the Nazis, being skeptical of all systems, all manias. In the 70's, political positions were so clearly split in Germany - the country was so divided over the Baader-Meinhof group - and I was annoyed by both sides. In terms of what I expressed in the paintings, that seemed my only choice, not because I wanted to be ambiguous but because I myself don't know how to answer these difficult questions. That was what I was conveying.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can bear this - that I am not the young wild guy [as he was in the 1970's]. I hope that the lust to work doesn't leave me. That would be sad. I am glad to get honors and high prices. But artists are valued today in terms of money, auctions. I wish society would need art more, but it doesn't. So I feel very lonely in this culture.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was enormously impressed by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana.. ..the sheer brazenness of it! That really fascinated me and impressed me. I might almost say that those paintings were the real reason I left the GDR [ German Democratic Republic ]. I realized that something was wrong with my whole way of thinking.. .I lived my life with a group of people who laid claim to a moral aspiration, who wanted to bridge a gap.. .And so the way we thought, and what we wanted for our own art, was all about compromise.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I painted [circa 1960-62] through the whole history of art toward abstraction. I painted like crazy [and] I had some success with all that, or gained some respect. But than I felt it wasn't it, and so I burned the crap in some sort of action in the courtyard. And then I began. It was wonderful to make something and then destroy it. It was doing something and I felt very free.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was no accident that I found my way to Götz at the time [c. 1960-62]. This 'Informal' element runs through every picture I've painted, whether it's a landscape, or a family painted from a photograph, or the Colour Charts or a Grey picture. And so now it is a pursuit of the same objectives by other means.. .As I now see it, all my paintings are 'Informal'.. ..except for the landscapes, perhaps.. .The 'Informal' is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism – the age of kings, of clearly formed hierarchies.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My first photo Picture? I was doing large pictures in gloss enamel.. .One day a photograph of Brigit Bardot fell into my hands, and I painted it into one of these pictures in shades of grey. I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic.. ..thing that everyone could do.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He [Richter's art-mate, the German painter Sigmar Polke ] was very different, he was not cool.. .He had irony. He was very funny. The things we did together [around 1963 – 1970] were a kind of craziness.. .We thought everything was so stupid and we refused to participate. That was the basis of our understanding.. ..he was able to paint those little dots in his raster paintings by hand with such a patience while he was living with his two children and his wife in a small subsidized apartment.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.. .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.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shocking, absolutely shocking – they [the German w:Fluxus artists] pissed in the tub, snag the German national anthem, covered the audience with paper, poured laundry detergent into the piano, attached microphones to fountain pens.. ..it was all very cynical and destructive; it was a signal for us and we (the German artists Lueg and Polke and Gerhard Richter himself] became [also] cynical and cocky.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did not come here [out of communist German Democratic Republic, to West-Germany] to get away from 'materialism'; here [in West –Germany] its dominance is far more total and more mindless. I came to get away from the criminal 'idealism' of the Socialists (quote circa 1962).”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The photograph reproduces objects in a different way from the painted picture, because the camera does not apprehend objects: it sees them. In 'free-hand drawing' the object is apprehended in all it parts.. .By tracing the outlines with the aid of a projector you can bypass and elaborate this process of apprehension. You no longer apprehend but see and make (without design) what you have not apprehended. And when you don't know what you are making, you don't know, either, what to alter or distort.”
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source