Gerhard Richter Quotes

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false

Art is the highest form of hope.

My paintings are wiser than I am.

I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.

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,

I have become involved with thinking and acting without the help of an ideology; I have nothing that helps me, no idea that I serve and am known for . . . no rules that regulate the how, no belief that gives me direction, no picture of the future, no instruction that produces an overly ordered mind. I acknowledge only what is and, accordingly, regard every description and configuration of that which we don’t know as madness. Ideologues seduce and exploit uncertainty, legitimize war.