Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gerhard Richter
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: February 9
Illustrator
Painter
Photographer
University Teacher
Visual Artist
Elbflorenz
Gehede Lixite
Geruharuto Rihitā
Gerd Richter
Art
Wells
Well
Believe
Painted
Things
Personally
Paint
Subjects
Painting

More quotes by Gerhard Richter

Image
My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.
Gerhard Richter
Image
My paintings are wiser than I am.
Gerhard Richter
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Art is the ideal medium for making contact with the transcendental, or at least for getting close to it.
Gerhard Richter
Image
Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God. ... The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster.
Gerhard Richter
Image
Illusion - or rather appearance, semblance - is the theme of my life (could be theme of speech welcoming freshmen to the Academy). All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible.
Gerhard Richter
Image
How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread.
Gerhard Richter
Image
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
Image
Art shows us how to see things that are constructive and good, and to be an active part of that.
Gerhard Richter
Image
In 1981, I think, for the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. Before that I designed a mirror room for Kasper König's Westkunst show, but it was never built. All that exists is the design - four mirrors for one room.
Gerhard Richter
Image
I was a student, and as such you generally rely on prior models of how to make art, but these were not satisfying. Then I discovered in photos what had been missing in paintings namely that they make a terrific variety of statements and have great substance. That is what I wanted to convey to paintings and apply to it.
Gerhard Richter
Image
I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.
Gerhard Richter
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I go to the studio every day, but I dont paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things.
Gerhard Richter
Image
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
Image
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