201 Quotes by Gerhard Richter

I pursue no intentions, no directions; I have no program, no style and no mission.

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.

Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth.

I never worked at painting as if it were a job; it was always out of interest or for fun, a desire to try something.

I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.

To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.

Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.