Gerhard Richter Quotes

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless.

In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

Art is not there simply to be understood. ... It is more the sense of an indication or suggestion.

I don't know of any good work of art that doesn't have a mystery.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore

The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.

There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.

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

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.