Gerhard Richter > Quotes

“To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.”
― Gerhard Richter

“Art is the highest form of hope.”
― Gerhard Richter

“I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false”
― Gerhard Richter

“It makes no sense to expect or claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable. We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty. But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.”
― Gerhard Richter

“My paintings are wiser than I am.”
― Gerhard Richter

“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”
― Gerhard Richter

“I have become involved with thinking and acting without the help of an ideology; I have nothing that helps me, no idea that I serve and am known for . . . no rules that regulate the how, no belief that gives me direction, no picture of the future, no instruction that produces an overly ordered mind. I acknowledge only what is and, accordingly, regard every description and configuration of that which we don’t know as madness. Ideologues seduce and exploit uncertainty, legitimize war.”
― Gerhard Richter

“I know nothing I can do nothing. I understand nothing. I know nothing Nothing. And all this misery doesn't even make me particularly unhappy”
― Gerhard Richter

“We might say, therefore, that the legacy of post-Kantian critique unfolds under the sign of a triple demand: to advance a critical perspective on the object; to delimit the parameters that establish critique as a self-critique of the principles of reason; and to conceive of critique as a self-constitutive praxis that takes itself as its object in a self-reflexive examination of its own presuppositions and processes.”
― Gerhard Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin