I always wanted to have the courage to do totally crazy, impossible, and also wrong things. - Isa Genzken

Considering that Beuys was born in a small German town called Kleve and I was born in another small German town called Bad Oldesloe, I believe that even an airport can be an inspiring place for an artist. A Nobel Prize laureate once said something along the lines of, 'The more one travels, the more intelligent one becomes,' however, I think that you can still travel a lot and remain sheltered.

..you see they hung my painting here [on her show 'Wind', 2009] I did that in the early 1990s. People never really liked them so much back then, they thought they looked more like photographs. Actually, I was doing them when I was still married to Gerhard Richter [till 1993], and it was somehow in relation to what he was doing, you know, these kind of side-to-side gestural abstracts – done like this [gestures as if pulling a squeegee over a surface from one side to the other] like paintings of the 1950s. Mine were called 'Basic Research', they were rubbings of oil paint on canvas – frottages of the floor of my studio. I did quite a few of these. [[w:Gerhard] Richter|[Gerhard] Richter]] put one up in his studio for some time.. .But he found it too hard and then took it out after a while.

I was so disappointed at first [visiting the pyramids in Egypt, in her 20s], because they looked so small, but then when you approached them, they got so big. It's an amazing effect.