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Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.

Gerhard Richter

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Gerhard Richter
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: February 9
Illustrator
Painter
Photographer
University Teacher
Visual Artist
Elbflorenz
Gehede Lixite
Geruharuto Rihitā
Gerd Richter
People
Priests
Philosopher
Artists
Artist
Left
Art
Important
World
Philosophers

More quotes by Gerhard Richter

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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.
Gerhard Richter
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The Atlas belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich - it's long since ceased to belong to me. Occasionally I run across it somewhere, and I think it's interesting because it looks different each time.
Gerhard Richter
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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.
Gerhard Richter
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It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.
Gerhard Richter
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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 (as stupid as the question about the meaning of life)
Gerhard Richter
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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 my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something. Even if that is only by being well organized. That too is form.
Gerhard Richter
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Composition is a side issue. Its role in my selection of photographs is a negative one at best. By which I mean that the fascination of a photograph is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content. And, on the other hand, composition always also has its own fortuitous rightness.
Gerhard Richter
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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.
Gerhard Richter
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Weeks go by, and I dont paint until finally I cant stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost dont want to talk about it, because I dont want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself.
Gerhard Richter
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... 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
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I see the bomber pictures as an anti-war statement... which they aren't - at all. Pictures like that don't do anything to combat war. They only show one tiny aspect of the subject of war - maybe only my own childish feelings of fear and fascination with war and with weapons of that kind.
Gerhard Richter
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Painting is traditional but for me that doesn't mean the academy. I felt a need to paint I love painting. It was something natural - as is listening to music or playing an instrument for some people. For this reason I searched for themes of my era and my generation. Photography offered this, so I chose it as a medium for painting.
Gerhard Richter
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Based on mixtures of the three primary colours, along with black and white, I come up with a certain number of possible colours and, by multiplying these by two or four, I obtain a definite number of colour fields that I multiply yet again by two, etc. But the complete realization of this project demands a great deal of time and work.
Gerhard Richter
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I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.
Gerhard Richter
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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.
Gerhard Richter
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These pictures possibly give rise to questions of political content or historical truth. Neither interests me in this instance. And although even my motivation for painting them is probably of no significance, I am trying to put a name to it here, as an articulation, parallel to the pictures, as it were, of my disquiet and of my opinion.
Gerhard Richter
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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.
Gerhard Richter
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The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.
Gerhard Richter
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I wanted to make it as anonymous as a photo. But it was perhaps also the wish for perfection, the unapproachable, which then means loss of immediacy. Something is missing then, though that is why I gave that up.
Gerhard Richter
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Art shows us how to see things that are constructive and good, and to be an active part of that.
Gerhard Richter