Gerhard Richter Painting Quotations

I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting - of art in general - which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.

Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.

Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.

The painter sees the semblance of things and repeats it. That is, without fabricating the things himself, he fabricates their semblance; and, if that no longer recalls any object, this artificially produced semblance functions only because it is scrutinized for likeness to a familiar - that is, object-related - semblance.

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.

Well, I don't believe there are subjects that can't be painted, but there are a lot of things that I personally can't paint.

The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone.

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.

My paintings are wiser than I am.

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

I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.

Not the victims of any specific ideology of the left or of the right, but of the ideological posture as such. This has to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail...

My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.

Painting is another form of thinking.

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 is not easy to see through.

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, and you leave out the ones that can't be said but are always the most important.

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.

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.