24 quotes
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 search for God.
I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violence, and I am not violent).
Doubt and belief in painting (2003)
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.
Doubt and belief in painting (2003)
My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for.
The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962)
Art is the highest form of hope.
The idea that art copies nature is a fatal misconception. Art has always operated against nature and for reason.
The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962)
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.
Doubt and belief in painting (2003)
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.
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.
Doubt and belief in painting (2003)
My works are not just rhetorical, except in the sense that all art is rhetorical. I believe in beauty.
Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms (2002)
Art serves to establish community. It links us with others and with the things around us, in a shared vision and effort.
The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962)
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.
Doubt and belief in painting (2003)
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.
I believe that art has a kind of Rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false. And that's why classical paintings, which are right in their own terms, are so necessary for me. In addition to that there's nature, which also has this rightness.
Doubt and belief in painting (2003)
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.. .Painting is another form of thinking.
I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed. Our eyes have evolved for survival purposes. The fact that they can also see the stars is pure accident.
Doubt and belief in painting (2003)
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.
Doubt and belief in painting (2003)
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 (quote circa 1962).
Doubt and belief in painting (2003)
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.
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: An Artist Beyond Isms (2002)