Gerhard Richter Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• 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 language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

  Gerhard Richter

  Painting, Language, Difficult

  "Gerhard Richter - Painting". Documentary, 2011.

• 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

  Knowing, Long, Leaving

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

• I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting. My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Real, Interesting

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Sep 03, 2014

• I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Style, Technique

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Jul 04, 2014

• My paintings are wiser than I am.

  Gerhard Richter

  Painting, Wiser

• I don't believe in the reality of painting, so I use different styles like clothes: it's a way to disguise myself.

  Gerhard Richter

  Believe, Reality, Clothes

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Mar 06, 2012

• I was a student, and as such you generally rely on prior models of how to make art, but these were not satisfying. Then I discovered in photos what had been missing in paintings; namely that they make a terrific variety of statements and have great substance. That is what I wanted to convey to paintings and apply to it.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Missing, Technique

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

• Cage is much more disciplined. He made chance a method and used it in constructive ways; I never did that. Everything here is a little more chaotic.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Cages, Littles

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

• Painting pictures is simply the official, the daily work, the profession, and in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits.

  Gerhard Richter

  Spirit, Painting, Mood

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

• 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

  Art, Mean, Reflection

• They are specific places I have discovered here and there when I am on the road to take photos. I go especially to take photos.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Here And There, Painting

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

• I wanted to say something different: the pictures are also a leave-taking, in several respects. Factually: these specific persons are dead; as a general statement, death is leave-taking. And then ideologically: a leave-taking from a specific doctrine of salvation and, beyond that, from the illusion that unacceptable circumstances of life can be changed by this conventional expedient of violent struggle.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Struggle, Different

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

• When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, War, Looks

• Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.

  Gerhard Richter

  Photography, Art, Drawing

• The desire to please is maligned, unfairly. There are many sides to it. First of all, pictures have to arouse interest before people will even look at them, and then they have to show something that holds that interst - and naturally they have to be presentable, just as a song has to be sung well, otherwise people run away. One mustn't underrate this quality, and I have always been delighted when my pieces have also appealed to the museum guards, the laymen.

  Gerhard Richter

  Running, Song, Art

• 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

  Art, Mean, Thinking

• 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

  Art, Powerful, May

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

• Family photos, pictures of groups, those are truely wonderful. And they are just as good as the old masters, just as rich and just as beautifully composed (what does that mean anyway).

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Mean, Groups

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Jun 23, 2015

• I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Numbers, Tree

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

• ... landscapes or still-lifes I paint in between the abstract works; they constitute about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand they are useful, because I like to work from nature - although I do use a photograph - because I think that any detail from nature has a logic I would like to see in abstraction as well.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Thinking, Hands

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

• And then the work bears a strong sense of leave-taking for me personally. It ends the work I began in the 1960s (paintings from black-and-white photographs), with a compressed summation that precludes any possible continuation. And so it is a leave-taking from thoughts and feelings of my own on a very basic level. Not that this is a deliberate act, of course; it is a quasi-automatic sequence of disintegration and reformation which I can perceive, as always, only in retrospect.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Strong, Black And White

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

• In 1981, I think, for the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. Before that I designed a mirror room for Kasper König's Westkunst show, but it was never built. All that exists is the design - four mirrors for one room.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Thinking, Mirrors

• I believe that he knew more what he was doing. I might be absolutely wrong about this, but that was my impression.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Believe, Might

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

• I remember that I felt I had to avoid all these sensational photos, the hanged woman, the man who shot himself, and so forth. I collected a great deal of material, including a number of banal, irrelevant photos, and then in the course of my work I came back to the very pictures I had actually wanted to avoid, which summed up the various stories.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Men, Numbers

• The smudging makes the paintings a bit more complete. When they're not blurred, so many details seem wrong, and the whole thing is wrong too. Then smudging can help make the painting invincible, surreal, more enigmatic - that's how easy it is.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Technique, Details

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Jul 14, 2015

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