Gerhard Richter Quotes

#1. Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.

Gerhard Richter

#2. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#3. A father draws boundaries and calls a halt, whenever necessary. As I didn't have that, I was able to stay childishly naive that much longer - so I did what I liked, because there was nobody stopping me, even when I got it wrong.

Gerhard Richter

#4. I have no motif, only motivation. I believe that motivation is the real thing, the natural thing, and that the motif is old-fashioned, even reactionary (as stupid as the question about the meaning of life)

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#6. The reason these paintings are destined for New York is not because I am disappointed about a lack of German interest, but because MoMA asked me, and because I consider it to be the best museum in the world.

Gerhard Richter

#7. I go to the studio every day, but I don't paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things.

Gerhard Richter

#8. 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

#9. The paint for the grey paintings was mixed beforehand and then applied with different implements - sometimes a roller, sometimes a brush. It was only after painting them that I sometimes felt that the grey was not yet satisfactory and that another layer of paint was needed.

Gerhard Richter

#10. Gray is the color ... the most important of all ... absent of opinion, nothing, neither/nor.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#12. Weeks go by, and I don't paint until finally I can't stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself.

Gerhard Richter

#13. I have painted my family so frequently because they are the one who really affect me the most.

Gerhard Richter

#14. I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#16. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#17. I wanted to make it as anonymous as a photo. But it was perhaps also the wish for perfection, the unapproachable, which then means loss of immediacy. Something is missing then, though; that is why I gave that up.

Gerhard Richter

#18. People won't stop painting, just as they won't stop making music or dancing. This is a facility we have. Children don't stop doing it or having it. On the other hand, it seems we don't need painting anymore. Culture is more interested in entertaining people.

Gerhard Richter

#19. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#20. The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone.

Gerhard Richter

#21. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#22. I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

Gerhard Richter

#23. Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

Gerhard Richter

#24. Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.

Gerhard Richter

#25. I can't paint as well as Vermeer.

Gerhard Richter

#26. We've lost these qualities, these abilities to do something by hand. Some illustrators have it still, but it's just not art. We have photography. We have cameras and computers that do it better and faster.

Gerhard Richter

#27. I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting. My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#29. Talk about painting: there's no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can't be said but are always the most important.

Gerhard Richter

#30. I'm never really sure what that word means, but however inaccurately I use it, 'classical' was always my ideal, as long as I can remember, and something of that has always stayed with me, to this day. Of course, there were difficulties, because in comparison to my ideal, I didn't even come close.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#32. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#33. 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.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#35. 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

#36. The political topicality of my October paintings means almost nothing to me, but in many reviews it is the first or only thing that arouses interest, and the response to the pictures varies according to current political circumstance. I find this rather a distraction.

Gerhard Richter

#37. Chance determines our lives in important ways.

Gerhard Richter

#38. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#39. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#40. Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless.

Gerhard Richter

#41. I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting - of art in general - which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.

Gerhard Richter

#42. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#43. Politicians are nauseating by definition ... They can produce nothing, neither a loaf of bread nor a table nor a picture; and this inability to create value, this total inferiority, makes them jealous, vengeful, insolent and a menace to life and limb.

Gerhard Richter

#44. 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.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#48. My paintings are wiser than I am.

Gerhard Richter

#49. But it is also untrue that I have nothing specific in mind. As with my landscapes: I see countless landscapes, photograph barely 1 in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph. I am therefore seeking something quite specific; from this I conclude that I know what I want.

Gerhard Richter

#50. 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.'

Gerhard Richter

#51. To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#54. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#55. 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

#56. It's our culture, Christian history, that's what formed me. Even as an atheist, I believe. We're just built that way.

Gerhard Richter

#57. 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

#58. When I begin, theoretically and practically I can smear anything I want on the canvas. Then there's a condition I have to react to, by changing it or destroying it.

Gerhard Richter

#59. I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting.

Gerhard Richter

#60. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#61. There is sorrow, but I hope one can see that it is sorrow for the people who died so young and so crazy, for nothing. I have respect for them, but also for their wishes, or for the power of their wishes. Because they tried to change the stupid things in the world.

Gerhard Richter

#62. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#63. I see the bomber pictures as an anti-war statement ... which they aren't - at all. Pictures like that don't do anything to combat war. They only show one tiny aspect of the subject of war - maybe only my own childish feelings of fear and fascination with war and with weapons of that kind.

Gerhard Richter

#64. I believe in painting and I believe in eating too. What can we do? We have to eat, we have to paint, we have to live. Of course, there are different ways to survive. But it's my best option.

Gerhard Richter

#65. It's that same quality I've been talking about. It's neither contrived, nor surprising and smart, not baffling, not witty, not interesting, not cynical, it can't be planned and it probably can't even be described. It's just good.

Gerhard Richter

#66. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#67. 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).

Gerhard Richter

#68. Art should be serious, not a joke. I don't like to laugh about art.

Gerhard Richter

#69. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#70. Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.

Gerhard Richter

#71. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#72. 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.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#74. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#75. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#76. 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

#77. I believe that you always have to believe. It's the only way; after all we both believe that we will do this exhibition. But I can't believe in God, as such, he's either too big or too small for me, and always incomprehensible, unbelievable.

Gerhard Richter

#78. All photographs are far more important than any painting.

Gerhard Richter

#79. The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.

Gerhard Richter

#80. 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.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#82. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#83. Art is the highest form of hope.

Gerhard Richter

#84. You can compare it to dreams: you have a very specific and individual pictorial language that you either accept or that you can translate rashly and wrongly. Of course, you can ignore dreams, but that would be a shame, because they're useful.

Gerhard Richter

#85. Every museum is full of nice things. That's the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#88. 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 ...

Gerhard Richter

#89. 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.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#91. 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.

Gerhard Richter

#92. I don't think I can do this - painting under observation. It's the worst thing there is, worse than being in the hospital.

Gerhard Richter

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

Gerhard Richter

#94. Maybe we didn't even have a chance. The message of American Pop Art was so powerful and so optimistic. But it was also very limited, and that led us to believe that we could somehow distance ourselves from it and communicate a different intention.

Gerhard Richter