Gerhard Richter Quotes

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

I don't think geometric art is... I don't like to call it that. I don't think it's any more pure than pop art or anything else. It doesn't have anything to do with purity.

To me, a drop of oil paint or a xerographic dot are the same thing - they're all just language.

Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.

In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.

The form of my painting is the content. My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved, or square. I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves. In Red Yellow Blue III the square panels present color. It was made to exist forever in the present; it is an idea and can be repeated anytime in the future.

Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.

Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.

No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.

Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.

What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward - neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.

Even luxuries are arranged according to ideas and ideals, to make them reflect as much of thought-life as possible - and this is Art.