Top 70 Gerhard Richter Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Art is the highest form of hope.”

— Gerhard Richter

2. “If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.”

— Gerhard Richter

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

— Gerhard Richter

4. “Painting is another form of thinking.”

— Gerhard Richter

5. “I don’t mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.”

— Gerhard Richter

6. “I’m trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That’s all.”

— Gerhard Richter

7. “Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.”

— Gerhard Richter

8. “I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting. My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich.”

— Gerhard Richter

9. “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.”

— Gerhard Richter

10. “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

11. “Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.”

— Gerhard Richter

12. “The smudging makes the paintings a bit more complete. When they’re not blurred, so many details seem wrong, and the whole thing is wrong too. Then smudging can help make the painting invincible, surreal, more enigmatic – that’s how easy it is.”

— Gerhard Richter

13. “Talk about painting: there’s no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can’t be said but are always the most important.”

— Gerhard Richter

14. “Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting – of a landscape, for example – and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.”

— Gerhard Richter

15. “What counts isn’t being able to do a thing, it’s seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.”

— Gerhard Richter

16. “You can compare it to dreams: you have a very specific and individual pictorial language that you either accept or that you can translate rashly and wrongly. Of course, you can ignore dreams, but that would be a shame, because they’re useful.”

— Gerhard Richter

17. “The political topicality of my October paintings means almost nothing to me, but in many reviews it is the first or only thing that arouses interest, and the response to the pictures varies according to current political circumstance. I find this rather a distraction.”

— Gerhard Richter

18. “All photographs are far more important than any painting.”

— Gerhard Richter

19. “Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.”

— Gerhard Richter

20. “I don’t create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.”

— Gerhard Richter

21. “I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.”

— Gerhard Richter

22. “I’m never really sure what that word means, but however inaccurately I use it, ‘classical’ was always my ideal, as long as I can remember, and something of that has always stayed with me, to this day. Of course, there were difficulties, because in comparison to my ideal, I didn’t even come close.”

— Gerhard Richter

23. “But it is also untrue that I have nothing specific in mind. As with my landscapes: I see countless landscapes, photograph barely 1 in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph. I am therefore seeking something quite specific; from this I conclude that I know what I want.”

— Gerhard Richter

24. “Not the victims of any specific ideology of the left or of the right, but of the ideological posture as such. This has to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail...”

— Gerhard Richter

25. “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

26. “The paint for the grey paintings was mixed beforehand and then applied with different implements – sometimes a roller, sometimes a brush. It was only after painting them that I sometimes felt that the grey was not yet satisfactory and that another layer of paint was needed.”

— Gerhard Richter

27. “The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone.”

— Gerhard Richter

28. “To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.”

— Gerhard Richter

29. “My paintings are wiser than I am.”

— Gerhard Richter

30. “In truth, factual information – names or dates – have never interested me much. Those things are like an alien language that can interfere with the language of the painting, or even prevent its emergence.”

— Gerhard Richter

31. “Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.”

— Gerhard Richter

32. “How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread.”

— Gerhard Richter

33. “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.”

— Gerhard Richter

34. “To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.”

— Gerhard Richter

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

— Gerhard Richter

36. “I don’t know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the ‘essential dimension,’ the thing that makes great works of art great.”

— Gerhard Richter

37. “When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals.”

— Gerhard Richter

38. “Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form, trust my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something. Even if that is only by being well organized. That too is form.”

— Gerhard Richter

39. “There is sorrow, but I hope one can see that it is sorrow for the people who died so young and so crazy, for nothing. I have respect for them, but also for their wishes, or for the power of their wishes. Because they tried to change the stupid things in the world.”

— Gerhard Richter

40. “I don’t believe in the reality of painting, so I use different styles like clothes: it’s a way to disguise myself.”

— Gerhard Richter

41. “I do not mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing, but I am suspicious regarding the image of reality which our senses convey to us, and which is incomplete and limited. Our eyes have developed such as to survive. It is merely coincidence that we can see stars with them, as well.”

— Gerhard Richter

42. “Painting pictures is simply the official, the daily work, the profession, and in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits.”

— Gerhard Richter

43. “It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.”

— Gerhard Richter

44. “Cage is much more disciplined. He made chance a method and used it in constructive ways; I never did that. Everything here is a little more chaotic.”

— Gerhard Richter

45. “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.”

— Gerhard Richter

46. “The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.”

— Gerhard Richter

47. “I am ridiculously old-fashioned.”

— Gerhard Richter

48. “Maybe we didn’t even have a chance. The message of American Pop Art was so powerful and so optimistic. But it was also very limited, and that led us to believe that we could somehow distance ourselves from it and communicate a different intention.”

— Gerhard Richter

49. “Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There’s no defence against that – and really it’s no bad thing.”

— Gerhard Richter

50. “I want pictorial content without sentiment, but I want it as human as possible.”

— Gerhard Richter