Richter Art Quotes

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.

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.

Lo vi yo, lo vio el cosmos, lo vio el eje de la Tierra, que debió de sufrir un desplazamiento con el terremoto de diez mil en la escala Richter que me provocó en el centro del pecho semejante espécimen de macho humano. O en el estómago. O en la vesícula. Vete tú a saber, que ahí dentro está todo muy junto.

Like the swimming rats in Richter’s experiment, we can survive for only so long without solid ground beneath our feet; if the choices aren’t real, sooner or later we will go under. It’s important, therefore, that we examine our assumptions about choice and that we openly discuss how, when and why it falls short.

I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsman like but technological … I also blur out the excess of unimportant information” (fig. 1.6).30 The usual critical response to these works is to see the blurring as a reference to accidental effects in amateur photography, to the artlessness and thus authenticity of such “mistakes.” Hawker eloquently explains why Richter’s translation from photo to paint is significant: At the same time that the blur is able to evoke the medium of photography so effectively and economically, in using it as a sign of photography’s idiom, Richter fastens upon something incidental to and quite apart from the medium’s central unifying characteristics (whatever these might be). It is the double duty that the blur does for Richter – its ability to be incidental to photography at the same time as central to painting – that makes it such a powerfully affecting device in his painting.31

Why do we as humans create art? Why is Richter’s work regarded as art while a book of Dulux colour samples is not?

Judex (Matthäus Richter), like many others who wrote about printing, was puzzled why the invention was unknown for so long. He concluded that the art was only revealed to mankind at the very time that God had chosen for unmasking the anti-Christ.