Gerhard Richter Quotes

Quotes -"Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writing from 1962 - 1993,"

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

--All we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.

--To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.

--I prefer the 'naive' photograph, with a simple, uncomplicated composition. That's why I like the Mona Lisa so much; there's nothing to her.

--Being able to do something is never an adequate reason for doing it.

--Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures ... It [making good pictures] demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects, it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name.

--Talk about painting: there's no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can't be said but are always the most important.

--Now that there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.

--I do know that painting is not without an effect -- I only want it to have more of one.

--Painting is total idiocy. [On why he continues painting, despite lack of effect]

--Not bankruptcy, but always inadequacy. [On the limits of painting]

--Surely you don't think that a stupid demonstration of brushwork, or of the rhetoric of painting and its elements, could ever achieve anything, say anything, express any longing.

Reading thoughts from famous artists somehow makes them more human.  I think the idea of a successful artist is not the fact that one painting sells for $13 million or more, but that he or she has found a way to achieve a level of insanity and obsession with the creative process.

Jessie