Gerhard Richter Quotes

The ones that weren't paintable were the ones I did paint. The dead. To start with, I wanted more to paint the whole business, the world as it then was, the living reality – I was thinking in terms of something big and comprehensive. But then it all evolved quite differently, in the direction of death. And that's really not all that unpaintable. Far from it, in fact. Death and suffering have always been an artistic theme. Basically, it's the theme. We've eventually managed to wean ourselves away from it, with our nice, tidy lifestyle.. .They [ Red Army Faction-members were 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..

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.

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.

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.

This one is too elegant, too shiny, like jewelry. It seeks applause. This is clear to me, but difficult to explain, which is what makes abstraction so fascinating. In one sense, abstract art is absolutely nothing, stupid. In 100 years, maybe people will just think it's garbage. But somehow we see something in it; we have a sense of quality. [searching for an illustration of his point, Richter leafs through a catalog to find some of his 'gray monochromes']. I was doing these [monochromes] when I was getting divorced. When you feel totally empty, you do this - but then I saw that one picture was actually better than another. Both were miserable, but the difference was interesting. I loved this: that there must be something, some higher faculty, some progressive sensibility that we find in abstraction. But it is impossible to describe.

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.

I don't have a specific picture in my mind's eye. I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a ready-made) always possesses. Of course, this is also a method of bringing in unconscious processes, as far as possible. I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things that I can think out for myself.

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.

As soon as artistic activity turns into an 'ism', it ceases to be artistic activity. To be alive is to engage in a daily struggle for form and for survival. (By way of analogy: social concern is a form and a method that is currently seen as appropriate and right. But where it elevates itself into Socialism, an order and a dogma, then it loses its best and truest qualities and may turn criminal.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

We [Richter and w:Blinky Palermo ] could really just speak about painting. The main thing was about the surface of color or the proportion of color. It was impossible for me to talk to Sigmar Polke about the opacity of color. With Palermo, yes. We supported each other, we comforted each other a little bit. We thought this really could not be true that everything was supposed to be over ['painting' as an expression of art, in the 1970's). Art had to be relevant [in the 1970's], and our art was not relevant.

There is no excuse whatever for uncritically accepting what one takes over from others. For no thing is good or bad in itself, only as it relates to specific circumstances and to our own intentions. This fact means that there is nothing guaranteed or absolute about conventions; it gives us the daily responsibility of distinguishing good from bad.