Gerhard Richter Quotes

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

Art is science made flesh.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

The actor creates with his own flesh and blood all those things which all the arts try in some way to describe.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I've always had a creative urge and I get immense satisfaction from creating something because it feels like I'm making sense of the world and imposing order on it.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

I think everybody starts out by seeing a few works of art and wanting to do something like them. You want to understand what you see, what is there, and you try to make a picture out of it. Later you realize that you can't represent reality at all - that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.

Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts.

I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.

There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.