Gerhard Richter Quotes

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  • Visual Artist
  • born 1932
  • 176 quotes

Gerhard Richter, Visual Artist (born 1932), is quoted 176 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Art, Painting, Believe and Reality.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

Art is the highest form of hope.

I am ridiculously old-fashioned.

My paintings are wiser than I am.

I can't paint as well as Vermeer.

Painting is another form of thinking.

Chance determines our lives in important ways.

To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

Art should be serious, not a joke. I dont like to laugh about art.

To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.

Art is always to a large extent about need, despair and hopelessness.

Throwaway snapshots come closest to achieving the state of pure picture.

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

I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.

I pursue no intentions, no directions; I have no program, no style and no mission.

It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.

Gray is the color... the most important of all... absent of opinion, nothing, neither/nor.

I have painted my family so frequently because they are the one who really affect me the most.

Art shows us how to see things that are constructive and good, and to be an active part of that.

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

I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.

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

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 ideal medium for making contact with the transcendental, or at least for getting close to it.

I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.

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

Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.

I believe that the quintessential task of every painter in any time has been to concentrate on the essential.

Now that we do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the most important people in the world.

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

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

I never worked at painting as if it were a job; it was always out of interest or for fun, a desire to try something.

It's our culture, Christian history, that's what formed me. Even as an atheist, I believe. We're just built that way.

I don't think I can do this - painting under observation. It's the worst thing there is, worse than being in the hospital.

I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting.

Well, I don't believe there are subjects that can't be painted, but there are a lot of things that I personally can't paint.

My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.

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.

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.

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.

My landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful'.

I don't dare to think my paintings are great. I can't understand the arrogance of someone saying, 'I have created a big, important work.'

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.

Every museum is full of nice things. That's the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things.

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

When I make a representation of something, this, too, is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it.

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

I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting - of art in general - which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.

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.

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 is quoted on

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