Mari Carmen Ramirez Quotes

Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.

I don't know if you've noticed it. But Duchamp was magnificent.

I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning's work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people that knew about it.

Warhol was definitely an inspiration when I was younger. I wouldn't quantify his sort of influence. I've been influenced by nature and science, and I've been influenced by people like Ernst and Rauschenberg, Cornell and Bosch and Bruegel, by writers like Haruki Murakami to Pablo Neruda to Artaud.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol.

Those damned Abstract Expressionists. They were a major problem. Because the critics adored them to such an extent, reams and reams, pages and pages of articles about Abstract Expressionists, when we came along, we were just not taken seriously at all.

I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.

Sol LeWitt had a huge influence on my work because of his use of repetition and his clarity, setting up a system and letting that system go. That's kind of where the text paintings came from.

Conceptual art, I don't even know what that is.

One of my most strong memories was studying with Mel Bochner, one of the, I think, high water marks of American conceptual art.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Immaterial art is the strongest because there's no obstacle; there's just energy, and I believe in energy.

Art is a line around your thoughts.

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

Already in 1915, Sophie Tauber divides the surface of her aquarelle into squares and rectangles which she then juxtaposes horizontally and perpendicularly as Mondrian, Itten and Paul Klee did in the same period, fh). She constructs them as if they were masonry work. The colors are luminous, ranging from the raw yellow to deep red or blue.

Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

In art the Greeks were the children of the Egyptians. The day may yet come when we shall do justice to the high powers of that mysterious and imaginative people.

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.