Gerhard Richter - Color Quotes

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We [Richter and Blinky Palermo] could really just speak about painting. The main thing was about the surface of color or the proportion of color. It was impossible for me to talk to Sigmar Polke about the opacity of color. With Palermo, yes. We supported each other, we comforted each other a little bit. We thought this really could not be true that everything was supposed to be over ['painting' as an expression of art, in the 1970's]. Art had to be relevant [in the 1970's], and our art was not relevant.

Gerhard Richter
It was the ultimate possible statement of powerlessness and desperation [Richter is referring to John Cage's famous 'Lecture on Nothing']. Nothing, absolutely nothing left, no figures, no color, nothing. Then you realize after you've painted three of them that one's better than the others and you ask yourself why is that. When I see eight pictures together I no longer feel that they're sad, or if so, they're sad in a pleasant way.

Gerhard Richter
It [grey color] makes no statement whatever... It has the capacity that no other color has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape (note 99).... but, grey like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea.... The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of color.

Gerhard Richter
I only identified with Rothko's seriousness, which was absolutely to be admired. At that time, in the 1970's Barnett Newman, with his non-hierarchical structures, his non-relational Color Field painting, seemed more interesting because his work was less pretty.

Gerhard Richter
Do you know what was great? Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture. And then the freedom to paint whatever you felt like. Stags, aircraft, kings, secretaries. Not having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by painting – color, composition, space – and all of the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art.

Gerhard Richter