Non-Objective Art Quotes

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

In the past 10 years, I've looked at life as this Pollock stuff. And now I'm almost in the post Pollock phase.

I carry out my work thus: I never use models or nature for the figure, drapery or anything else.

I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.

I only understand realism.

I'm interested in Jackson Pollock's kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it's nothing, and yet it's incredible.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.

The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

Anything can be painted without representation.

My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.

I thought conceptual art was a joke.

What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth?

I first had no interest in figuration whatsoever.

Traditional conceptual art is very dry.

As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.

The thinking of John Cage derived from Duchamp and Dada. I was not interested in that.

A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!