Gerhard Richter - Sense Quotes

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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
My works are not just rhetorical, except in the sense that all art is rhetorical. I believe in beauty.

Gerhard Richter
Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God. We are well aware that making sense and picturing are artificial, like illusion; but we can never give them up. For belief (thinking out and interpreting the present and the future) is our most important characteristic.

Gerhard Richter
Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real - and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself.

Gerhard Richter
It makes no sense to expect or claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable. We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty. But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.

Gerhard Richter
But somewhere [during the 1950's, in East-Germany at the Art Academy] along the way we all began to notice that there was something wrong. We saw a few art magazines from the West and got a sense of another world. We began to talk about a third way between capitalism and Communism in art. I saw the work of graphic designers from Poland, the only ones [in communist area] I came across who seemed to be doing something for society but in a style that was more modern.

Gerhard Richter
I was already almost 30, and by then everyone was talking about the Americans. Picasso was irrelevant. He was history. I found myself in this deep pool, and there were all these figures swimming around, like Rauschenberg and Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. I wanted to go where they were. Seeing Pollock and Fontana in Kassel had given me a sense of what it meant to be a modern artist and take risks, but it was a distant admiration because they were a different generation. This was my generation [on the art academy in Düsseldorf].

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
Every word, every line, every thought is prompted by the age we live in, with all its circumstances, its ties, its efforts, its past and present. It is impossible to act or think independently and arbitrarily. This is comforting in a way. To the individual, the collective experience of the age represents a bond – and also, in a sense, security; there will always be possibilities even in disaster.

Gerhard Richter
The sciences certainly have influenced the arts. To an Aztec, the sunset was an inexplicable event, which he could not cope with or even survive without the imagined aid of his gods. Obvious phenomena of this sort have since been explained. But the sheer unimagined vastness of the explicable has now made the inexplicable into such a monstrous thing that our heads spin, and the old images burst like bubbles. The thought of the totally inexplicable (as when we look at the starry sky), and the impossibility of reading any sense into this monstrous vastness, so affect us that we need ignorance to survive.

Gerhard Richter