9 quotes
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)