Gerhard Richter Short Quotes

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My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for.

Gerhard Richter
I want pictorial content without sentiment, but I want it as human as possible

Gerhard Richter
If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

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

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
How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread.

Gerhard Richter
The idea that art copies nature is a fatal misconception. Art has always operated against nature and for reason.

Gerhard Richter
I don't believe in the reality of painting, so I use different styles like clothes: it's a way to disguise myself.

Gerhard Richter
I believe that he knew more what he was doing. I might be absolutely wrong about this, but that was my impression.

Gerhard Richter
Art serves to establish community. It links us with others and with the things around us, in a shared vision and effort.

Gerhard Richter
They are specific places I have discovered here and there when I am on the road to take photos. I go especially to take photos.

Gerhard Richter
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
The year is always correct, also the month, only the day can be another. But that occurs to me only in the moment of writing it down.

Gerhard Richter
My last wife [woman-artist Isa Genzken, he married in 1982 - they broke up in 1993] was very competitive, which was hard for both of us.

Gerhard Richter
I choose depending on the way I feel; randomly, in other words. When I haven't done anything for a long time, I always start small, on paper.

Gerhard Richter
Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.

Gerhard Richter
I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violence, and I am not violent).

Gerhard Richter
Cage is much more disciplined. He made chance a method and used it in constructive ways; I never did that. Everything here is a little more chaotic.

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
When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals.

Gerhard Richter
I would rather paint the victims than the killers... When Warhol painted the killers, I painted the victims. The subjects were of poor people, banal poor dogs.

Gerhard Richter
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
If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

Gerhard Richter
The Atlas belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich - it's long since ceased to belong to me. Occasionally I run across it somewhere, and I think it's interesting because it looks different each time.

Gerhard Richter
I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.

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