Gerhard Richter Quotes (96 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Gerhard Richter: 96 quotes1 like

Famous Gerhard Richter Quotes

“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”

Gerhard Richter

on the art academy in Düsseldorf
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“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

Quote of Richter on his 'Grey Paintings', in a letter to nl:Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Grey-paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/grey-paintings-9 1970's Variant: It [grey color] makes no statement whatever... It has the capacity that no other color has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape (note 99).... but, grey like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea.... The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of color.

“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

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' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/other-aspects-6 1970's

“I am primarily painting from photographs these days (from illustrated magazines but also from family photos), in a sense this is a stylistic problem, the form is naturalistic, even though the photograph is not nature at all but a prefabricated product (the “second-hand world” in which we live), I do not have to intervene artistically with style, since the stylization (deformation in form and color) contributes only under very particular circumstances toward clarifying and intensifying an object or a subject (generally stylization becomes the central problem which obscures everything else (object, subject), it leads to an unmotivated artificiality, an untouchable formalist taboo.”

Gerhard Richter

In Richter's letters from Düsseldorf, 19 July 1963 - to two artist friends, Helmut and Erika Heinze
1960's

“My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for.”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going – being lost, being a loser – reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

Gerhard Richter Quotes about painting

“The abstracts are the opposite to work on. That process is more like walking, step by step, without an intention, until you discover where you are going. When I paint a landscape from a photograph or an image like this one, I can see the end point before I start, although in fact it always turns out slightly different than I imagined. What I have is not facility, because this really doesn't take skill. I have an eye. I couldn't make a drawing of you sitting here right now. I would love to have that ability, in the same way that I would love to play the piano. Virtuosity is a precondition for pianists, but in addition you have to be good. These are not the same thing.”

Gerhard Richter

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and the tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings. If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 93, note 24

“I was like a gravedigger while I painted these corpses [of the dead Baader-Meinhoff members]. It was just work. If I felt one of them looked too theatrical, I painted over it… I was afraid more of the reaction on the left than the right. It was still very dangerous to deal with this subject in Germany. There was fear that the museum where I showed them might be bombed. All my friends were on the left, but I was not. They said: 'Someone with the right mentality could do this, but not Richter - he is too bourgeois. He steals Baader-Meinhof away from us.' To me, they were part of the problem. I was standing outside watching how people, on both sides [left / right], ignored the truth because of their beliefs, beliefs that made them crazy. That was the point of the pictures.”

Gerhard Richter

In 1988, Richter painted a series of 15 works titled 'October 18, 1977.' It shocked Germany, especially left. The series was based on photographs of the anti-capitalist Baader-Meinhof group, which called itself the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction) and were in prison and died in 1977.
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“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

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 painted a portrait of his aunt in 1965, based on an old photo. It was called 'Tante Marianne' / 9Aunt Marianne).
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“What I lack is the spiritual basis which under girded Romantic painting. We have lost the feeling of God's omnipresence in Nature. For us, everything is empty. Yet, these paintings [of a. o. Caspar David Friedrich ] are still there. They still speak to us. We continue to love them, to use them, to have need of them.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 109, note 62

“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

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 42, note 45 : quote on his period of Informal art

Gerhard Richter Quotes about art

“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

Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1 1960's

“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

Notes, 1988; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1 1980's

“The first 'Colour charts' were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples. They were still related to Pop Art. In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions... Based on mixtures of the three primary colours, along with black and white, I come up with a certain number of possible colours and, by multiplying these by two or four, I obtain a definite number of colour fields that I multiply yet again by two, etc. But the complete realization of this project demands a great deal of time and work.”

Gerhard Richter

Quote on Richter's 'Colour Charts', in an interview with Irmeline Lebeer, 1973; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Colour-charts' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/colour-charts-8 1970's

“The idea that art copies nature is a fatal misconception. Art has always operated against nature and for reason.”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“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

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“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.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), pp. 96-97

Gerhard Richter: Trending quotes

“I pursue no objectives, no systems, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 60, note 92

“Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass [like in his work '4 Panes of Glass', 1967], 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

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 86, note 12

“Art serves to establish community. It links us with others and with the things around us, in a shared vision and effort.”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

Gerhard Richter Quotes

“Their permanent presence [of the old traditional paintings out of the past] compels us to produce something different, which is neither better nor worse, but which has to be different because we painted the Isenheim Alter [of Grünewald, 14th century] yesterday.... the better we know tradition – i. e., ourselves and the more responsibly we deal with it, the better things we will make similar, and the better things we will make different.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 107, note 60

“The first impulse towards painting, or toward art in general, stems from the need to communicate, the effort to fix one's own vision, to deal with appearances (which are alien and must be given names and meanings.) Without this, all work would be pointless and unjustified, like Art for Art's Sake.”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted.... it is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich today.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 106, note 58

“Art is the highest form of hope.”

Gerhard Richter

in text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1 1980's

“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.”

Gerhard Richter

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“Of course, my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful'... By 'untruthful' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature – Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 108, note 61

“The sciences certainly have influenced the arts. To an Aztec, the sunset was an inexplicable event, which he could not cope with or even survive without the imagined aid of his gods. Obvious phenomena of this sort have since been explained. But the sheer unimagined vastness of the explicable has now made the inexplicable into such a monstrous thing that our heads spin, and the old images burst like bubbles. The thought of the totally inexplicable (as when we look at the starry sky), and the impossibility of reading any sense into this monstrous vastness, so affect us that we need ignorance to survive.”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“When I paint an abstract picture (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings – like that of a person who possesses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to build something useful which is not allowed to be a house or a chair or anything else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper, professional way he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful.”

Gerhard Richter

Notes, 1985; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Abstract paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/abstract-paintings-7 1980's

“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

Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/techniques-5 1960's

“This time the entire floor is covered with cut-up illustrated journals, a new tic and trick of mine (eight days now): I cut out photos from illustrated journals and dissolve them with a chemical solution and swipe and smear them. That is fabulous fun. I have always loved illustrated magazines, perhaps because of their documentary actuality. I have also already made a few attempts to paint something like that in a larger format. Curious to see how it will continue. I am pursuing something which in a certain way resembles the most recent movement: Pop art (from popular), probably came up in America and is now heating up the minds here.”

Gerhard Richter

In Richter's letters from Düsseldorf, 10 March 1963 - to two artist friends, Helmut and Erika Heinze
1960's

“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

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“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

In an interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloch, 1986
Richter was asked about his 'Monochrome Grey Pictures and Abstract Pictures' and their connection with the artists Yves Klein and Ellsworth Kelly.
1980's

“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

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' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/other-aspects-6 after 2000

“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

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“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

Notes, 1962; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1 1960's

“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

Quote of an interview with Dieter Schwarz, 1999; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Atlas' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/atlas-4 1990's

“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

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 51, note 60

“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

Notes, 1964; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/techniques-5 1960's

“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

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“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

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), pp. 45-46, note 43

“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

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 47

“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

Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Photo-paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/photo-paintings-12 1960's

“Dada is a farce, a legend, a state of myth. A badly behaved myth whose subterranean survival and capricious manifestation upset everyone... The aesthetic of absolute negativity has been changed into methodical doubt, thanks to which it will finally be able to incarnate new signs... After the NO and the ZERO, there is a third position for the myth; the anti-art gesture of Marcel Duchamp has been charged with positive energy. The Dada spirit identifies itself with a method of appropriation of exterior reality of the modern world... The ready-made is no longer the height of negativity or of polemic, but the basis element of a new expressive repertoire. Such is the New Realism: a direct means for getting one's feet back on the ground but at 40 degree above Dada zero.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 41, note 30

“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

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“Painting has nothing to do with thinking, because in painting thinking is painting. Thinking is language – record-keeping – and has to take place before and after. Einstein did not think when he was calculating: he calculated – producing the next equation in reaction to the one that went before – just as in painting one form is a response to another and so on.”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“[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

Quote from the interview with Rolf-Gunter Dienst, 1970; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1 1970's

“To defend painting: One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is pure idiocy.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993), p. 78

“Do you know what was great? Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture. And then the freedom to paint whatever you felt like. Stags, aircraft, kings, secretaries. Not having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by painting – color, composition, space – and all of the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), pp. 60-61, note 94

“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

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 42, note 34

“His Blinky Palermo constructive pictures have remained in my memory because they particularly appeal to me, because I can't produce such a thing. I always found it very good how he made it and that he made it – this astonished me. There was an aesthetic quality which I loved and which I couldn't produce, but I was happy that such a thing existed in the world. In comparison, my own things seemed to me somewhat destructive, without this beautiful clarity.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 96, note 30

“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.”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“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

in text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Abstract paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/abstract-paintings-7 1980's

“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

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“It makes no sense to expect or claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable. We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty. But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“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

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“1,024 Colours in 4 Permutations'
In order to represent all extant colour shades in one painting, I worked out a system which – starting from the three primaries, plus grey – made possible a continual subdivision (differentiation) through equal gradations. 4 x 4 = 16 x 4 = 64 x 4 = 256 x 4 = 1,024. The multiplier 4 was necessary because I wanted to keep the image size, the square size and the number of squares in a constant proportion to each other. To use more than 1,024 tones (4,096, for instance) seemed pointless, since the difference between one shade and the next would no longer have been detectable.
The arrangement of the colours on the squares was done by a random process, to obtain a diffuse, undifferentiated overall effect, combined with stimulating detail. The rigid grid precludes the generation of figurations, although with an effort these can be detected. This aspect of artificial naturalism fascinates me – as does the fact that, if I had painted all the possible permutations, light would have taken more than 400 billion years to travel from the first painting to the last. I wanted to paint four large, colourful pictures.”

Gerhard Richter

Richter's quote from the catalog of a group exhibition in 'Palais des Beaux-Arts', Brussels, 1974
1970's

“Pop art is neither an American invention nor an import, yet the terms and names were coined in the US, where they were popularised much faster than in Germany. This kind of art has evolved organically and independently over here, yet at the same time it becomes an analogy to American pop art due to certain psychological, cultural and economical preconditions that are the same in Germany as they are in the US.... For the first time we are showing paintings in Germany that relate to those terms, representing pop art, junk culture, imperial or capitalistic realism, new figuration, naturalism, German pop and other comparable terms.”

Gerhard Richter

Quote from Richter's letter to 'Neue Deutsche Wochenschau', 29 April 1963; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1 1960's

“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”

Gerhard Richter

quote circa 1962
Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), pp. 49-50, note 57

“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

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“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!”

Gerhard Richter

It's phony reverence. It's ridiculous.
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“Simply because I liked it so much I saw it in Venice and thought: I'd like to have that for myself. To start with I only meant to make a copy, so that I could have a beautiful painting at home and with it a piece of that period, all that potential beauty and sublimity... Then my copy went wrong, and the pictures that finally emerged went to show that it just can't be done any more, not even by way of a copy. All I could do was to break the whole thing down and show that it's no longer possible”

Gerhard Richter

Richter's quote refers to his 'Annunciation after Titian', he made in 1973
Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 104, note 52

“I would rather paint the victims than the killers... When Warhol painted the killers, I painted the victims. The subjects were of poor people, banal poor dogs.”

Gerhard Richter

comment on his painting 'Eight student nurses', compared with Warhol's art-work 'Thirteen most wanted man', in 1964
Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 56, note 79

“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

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 47

“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

“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

Notes, 1985; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/other-aspects-6 1980's

“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

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“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

Notes, 1964; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/other-aspects-6 1960's

“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.)”

Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“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

Quote in an interview with Astrid Kaspar, 2000; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/techniques-5 after 2000

“I only identified with (Rothko's seriousness, which was absolutely to be admired. At that time, in the 1970's Barnett Newman, with his non-hierarchical structures, his non-relational Color Field painting, seemed more interesting because his work was less pretty.”

Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), pp. 96, note 31