“As a record of reality, the thing I have to represent is unimportant and devoid of meaning, though I make it just as visible as if it were important. I am not saying that the thing represented is abolished as such. The representation simply acquires a different meaning: it becomes the pretext for a picture. Photography suits my purpose here: the photograph confronts me as a statement about a reality which I neither know nor judge, which does not interest me, and with which I do not identify.”

Gerhard Richter

“At the moment I have the feeling there is no more painting; we are going to lose it. It has ended. It is more and more true, no? There are very rare examples that are good.”

Gerhard Richter

“The picture is the depiction and the painting is the technique for shattering it… I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it’s really good – better than anything I could ever say on the subject.”

Gerhard Richter

“You take a photograph as a photograph, and if you are lucky you discover it later for a picture.”

“…all I am trying to do with a picture is to bring the most different and most contradictory things together with the greatest possible freedom, alive, and capable of living on.”

Gerhard Richter

“Successful works of art are such when they have a similar structure to and are organised in as truthful a way as nature.”

Gerhard Richter

“I don’t have a specific picture in my mind’s eye. I want to end up with a picture that I haven’t planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture. I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself.”

Gerhard Richter

“Nature in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves”

Gerhard Richter