Gerhard Richter - Picture Quotes

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The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.

Gerhard Richter
The political topicality of my October paintings means almost nothing to me, but in many reviews it is the first or only thing that arouses interest, and the response to the pictures varies according to current political circumstance. I find this rather a distraction.

Gerhard Richter
Nature/Structure. There is no more to say. In my pictures I reduce to that. But 'reduce' is the wrong word, because these are not simplifications. I can't verbalize what I am working on: to me, it is many-layered by definition; it is what is more important, what is more true.

Gerhard Richter
This superficial blurring has something to do with the incapacity I have just mentioned. I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn't explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted.

Gerhard Richter
As a matter of fact, it was only through the dealer Fred Jahn that I succeeded in overcoming my reservation about the works on paper and exhibiting them. Added to this, of course, was the fact that after ten years I could see the watercolours in a different light, and in conjunction with pictures painted afterwards, they had at least become more comprehensible to me.

Gerhard Richter
Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture - no matter whether good or bad. That's all the theory. It's no good. I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it's really good - better than anything I could ever say on the subject.

Gerhard Richter
I think everybody starts out by seeing a few works of art and wanting to do something like them. You want to understand what you see, what is there, and you try to make a picture out of it. Later you realize that you can't represent reality at all - that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.

Gerhard Richter
I wanted to say something different: the pictures are also a leave-taking, in several respects. Factually: these specific persons are dead; as a general statement, death is leave-taking. And then ideologically: a leave-taking from a specific doctrine of salvation and, beyond that, from the illusion that unacceptable circumstances of life can be changed by this conventional expedient of violent struggle.

Gerhard Richter
As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.

Gerhard Richter
I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.

Gerhard Richter
Of course, pictures of objects also have this transcendental side to them. Every object, being part of an ultimately incomprehensible world, also embodies that world; when represented in a picture, the object conveys this mystery all the more powerfully, the less of a 'function' the picture has. Hence, for instance, the growing fascination of many beautiful old portraits.

Gerhard Richter
My pictures are devoid of objects; like objects, they are themselves objects. This means that they are devoid of content, significance or meaning, like objects or trees, animals, people or days, all of which are there without a reason, without a function and without a purpose. This is the quality that counts. Even so, there are good and bad pictures.

Gerhard Richter
I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.

Gerhard Richter
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
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
The photograph reproduces objects in a different way from the painted picture, because the camera does not apprehend objects: it sees them. In 'free-hand drawing' the object is apprehended in all it parts... By tracing the outlines with the aid of a projector you can bypass and elaborate this process of apprehension. You no longer apprehend but see and make (without design) what you have not apprehended. And when you don't know what you are making, you don't know, either, what to alter or distort.

Gerhard Richter
The 'Grey Pictures' were done at a time when there were monochrome paintings everywhere. I painted them nonetheless.... Not Kelly, but Bob Ryman, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Yves Klein and many others.

Gerhard Richter
I even went all the way to Greenland, because C. D. Friedrich painted that beautiful picture of The Wreck of the 'Hope'. I took hundreds of photos up there and barely one picture [Richter's quote refers to his artwork 'Iceberg in Fog', 1982] came out of it.

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
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
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. Our eyes have evolved for survival purposes. The fact that they can also see the stars is pure accident.

Gerhard Richter
What I'm attempting in each picture is nothing other than this...to bring together in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom.

Gerhard Richter
I was called a formalist, and in East Germany that meant you could be denied a chance to exhibit. So I knew I had to leave [to West-Germany], not because I was worried about the controversy but because I knew the controversy was about a bad picture. It wasn't good enough to be controversial. I was getting all the wrong reactions. Friends said the work was wonderful, and the attacks made it seem more important than it was. I had started to earn money with the murals. I earned enough to get a car. That was a big deal. So it was not easy to give up. But I knew I had to leave.

Gerhard Richter
My first photo Picture? I was doing large pictures in gloss enamel... One day a photograph of Brigit Bardot fell into my hands, and I painted it into one of these pictures in shades of grey. I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic.... thing that everyone could do.

Gerhard Richter
It was no accident that I found my way to Götz at the time [c. 1960-62]. This 'Informal' element runs through every picture I've painted, whether it's a landscape, or a family painted from a photograph, or the Colour Charts or a Grey picture. And so now it is a pursuit of the same objectives by other means... As I now see it, all my paintings are 'Informal'.... except for the landscapes, perhaps... The 'Informal' is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism – the age of kings, of clearly formed hierarchies.

Gerhard Richter
His Blinky Palermo constructive pictures have remained in my memory because they particularly appeal to me, because I can't produce such a thing. I always found it very good how he made it and that he made it – this astonished me. There was an aesthetic quality which I loved and which I couldn't produce, but I was happy that such a thing existed in the world. In comparison, my own things seemed to me somewhat destructive, without this beautiful clarity.

Gerhard Richter
I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting, but use painting as a means to photography.

Gerhard Richter
Simply because I liked it so much I saw it in Venice and thought: I'd like to have that for myself. To start with I only meant to make a copy, so that I could have a beautiful painting at home and with it a piece of that period, all that potential beauty and sublimity... Then my copy went wrong, and the pictures that finally emerged went to show that it just can't be done any more, not even by way of a copy. All I could do was to break the whole thing down and show that it's no longer possible [Richter's quote refers to his 'Annunciation after Titian', he made in 1973].

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
Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass [like in his work '4 Panes of Glass', 1967], etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.

Gerhard Richter