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If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

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
Paintings
Stills
Still
Abstract
Landscape
Painting
Show
Lifes
Art
Landscapes
Shows
Yearning
Reality

More quotes by Gerhard Richter

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What counts isn't being able to do a thing, it's seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.
Gerhard Richter
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I never worked at painting as if it were a job it was always out of interest or for fun, a desire to try something.
Gerhard Richter
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Maybe we didn't even have a chance. The message of American Pop Art was so powerful and so optimistic. But it was also very limited, and that led us to believe that we could somehow distance ourselves from it and communicate a different intention.
Gerhard Richter
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The smudging makes the paintings a bit more complete. When they're not blurred, so many details seem wrong, and the whole thing is wrong too. Then smudging can help make the painting invincible, surreal, more enigmatic - that's how easy it is.
Gerhard Richter
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To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.
Gerhard Richter
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I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)
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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Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.
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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I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.
Gerhard Richter
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Art should be serious, not a joke. I dont like to laugh about art.
Gerhard Richter
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You can compare it to dreams: you have a very specific and individual pictorial language that you either accept or that you can translate rashly and wrongly. Of course, you can ignore dreams, but that would be a shame, because they're useful.
Gerhard Richter
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I do not mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing, but I am suspicious regarding the image of reality which our senses convey to us, and which is incomplete and limited. Our eyes have developed such as to survive. It is merely coincidence that we can see stars with them, as well.
Gerhard Richter
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I'm never really sure what that word means, but however inaccurately I use it, 'classical' was always my ideal, as long as I can remember, and something of that has always stayed with me, to this day. Of course, there were difficulties, because in comparison to my ideal, I didn't even come close.
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
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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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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
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The grey is certainly inspired by the photo-paintings, and, of course, it's related to the fact that I think grey is an important colour - the ideal colour for indifference, fence-sitting, keeping quiet, despair. In other words, for states of being and situations that affect one, and for which one would like to find a visual expression.
Gerhard Richter
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I believe that he knew more what he was doing. I might be absolutely wrong about this, but that was my impression.
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