Gerhard Richter Quotes

150 quotes in 2382 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.
• 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…
• Art is the highest form of hope.
• My paintings are wiser than I am.
• 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…
• I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false
• 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…
• I believe that the quintessential task of every painter in any time has been to concentrate on the essential.
• I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.
• Painting is another form of thinking.
• 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,…

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