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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
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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
Nothing
Communicate
Capable
Painting
Perhaps
Talk
Pointless
Words
Expressing
Language
Paintings
Difficult
Express
More quotes by Gerhard Richter
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
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
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
... 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
I believe that you always have to believe. It's the only way after all we both believe that we will do this exhibition. But I can't believe in God, as such, he's either too big or too small for me, and always incomprehensible, unbelievable.
Gerhard Richter
Throwaway snapshots come closest to achieving the state of pure picture.
Gerhard Richter
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
To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.
Gerhard Richter
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
How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread.
Gerhard Richter
I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.
Gerhard Richter
All photographs are far more important than any painting.
Gerhard Richter
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
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
It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.
Gerhard Richter
I am ridiculously old-fashioned.
Gerhard Richter
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.
Gerhard Richter
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
Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.
Gerhard Richter
Art should be serious, not a joke. I dont like to laugh about art.
Gerhard Richter