When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which… — Gerhard Richter Copy Share Image
Art shows us how to see things that are constructive and good, and to be an active part of that. — Gerhard Richter Copy Share Image
They are specific places I have discovered here and there when I am on the road to take photos. I go especially to take… — Gerhard Richter Copy Share Image
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… — Gerhard Richter Copy Share
Now that we do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the most important people in the world. — Gerhard Richter Copy Share Image
Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used… — Gerhard Richter Copy Share Image
A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision… — Gerhard Richter Copy Share
The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified.… — Gerhard Richter Copy Share Image
Perhaps the choice is a negative one, in that I was trying to avoid everything that touched on well-known issues - or any issues at all, whether painterly, social or aesthetic. I tried to find nothing too explicit, hence all the banal subjects; and then, again, I tried to avoid letting the banal turn into my issue and my trademark.… — Gerhard Richter Copy Share
Gray is the color... the most important of all... absent of opinion, nothing, neither/nor. — Gerhard Richter Copy Share Image
You can compare it to dreams: you have a very specific and individual pictorial language that you either accept or that you can translate… — Gerhard Richter Copy Share Image
What attracted me about my mirrors was the idea of having nothing manipulated in them. A piece of bought mirror. Just hung there, without… — Gerhard Richter Copy Share Image
