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Throwaway snapshots come closest to achieving the state of pure picture.

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
Achieve
State
States
Come
Snapshots
Achieving
Closest
Picture
Pure

More quotes by Gerhard Richter

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When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war.
Gerhard Richter
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Above all, it's never blind chance: it's a chance that is always planned, but also always surprising. And I need it in order to carry on, in order to eradicate my mistakes, to destroy what I've worked out wrong, to introduce something different and disruptive. I'm often astonished to find how much better chance is than I am.
Gerhard Richter
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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
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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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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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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
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My paintings are wiser than I am.
Gerhard Richter
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I am ridiculously old-fashioned.
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 is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.
Gerhard Richter
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Turning to the colour-classification methodology: The starting point are the four pure colours red, yellow, green and blue their in-between shades and scales of brightness result in colour schemes containing 16, 64, 256 and 1,024 shades. More colours would be pointless because it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between them clearly.
Gerhard Richter
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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
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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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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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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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To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.
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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The reason these paintings are destined for New York is not because I am disappointed about a lack of German interest, but because MoMA asked me, and because I consider it to be the best museum in the world.
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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Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless.
Gerhard Richter