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How Could One Be In This World Without Feeling Dismayed By It? Even If One Paints Flowers And Gingerbread.

-Gerhard Richter

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How Could One Be

Gerhard Richter

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How Could One Be In This World Without Feeling Dismayed By It? Even If One Paints Flowers And Gingerbread.

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Without Form, Communication Stops... Without Form, You Have Everybody Burbling On To Themselves, Whenever And However, Things That No One Else Can Understand And - Rightly - No One Else Is Interested In.

My Landscapes Are Not Only Beautiful Or Nostalgic, With A Romantic Or Classical Suggestion Of Lost Paradises, But Above All 'untruthful'.

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.

Architecture Was, Or Is, A Kind Of Hobby, An Inclination I Have To Fiddling Around And Building Things. Putting Up Shelves Or Cupboards, Or Making Tools, Or Designing Houses ... It Always Has A Functional Or Social Motivation. If Social Changes Are In The Air, I Am Gripped Immediately By The Desire To Build, And I Think That I Accelerate Or Anticipate Changes In My Life By Doing So, At Least In Draft. In The Case Of My House, That Was Anticipation: In Other Words, First Build, Then Change One's Life.

Photography Has Almost No Reality; It Is Almost A Hundred Per Cent Picture. And Painting Always Has Reality: You Can Touch The Paint; It Has Presence; But It Always Yields A Picture - No Matter Whether Good Or Bad. That's All The Theory. It's No Good. 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.

Art Is Always To A Large Extent About Need, Despair And Hopelessness.

But My Motivation Was More A Matter Of Wanting To Create Order - To Keep Track Of Things. All Those Boxes Full Of Photographs And Sketches Weigh You Down, Because They Have Something Unfinished, Incomplete, About Them. So It's Better To Present The Usable Material In An Orderly Fashion And Throw The Other Stuff Away. That's How The Atlas Came To Be, And I Exhibited It A Few Times.

Now There Are No Priests Or Philosophers Left, Artists Are The Most Important People In The World.

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.

The Grey Paintings, For Example, A Painted Grey Surface, Completely Monochromatic - They Come From A Motivation, Or Result From A State, That Was Very Negative. It Has A Lot To Do With Hopelessness, Depression And Such Things. But It Has To Be Turned On Its Head In The End, And Has To Come To A Form Where These Paintings Possess Beauty. And In This Case, It's Not A Carefree Beauty, But Rather A Serious One.

Art Should Be Serious, Not A Joke. I Dont Like To Laugh About Art.

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.

As Far As The Surface Is Concerned - Oil On Canvas, Conventionally Applied - My Pictures Have Little To Do With The Original Photograph. They Are Totally Painting (whatever That May Mean). On The Other Hand, They Are So Like The Photograph That The Thing That Distinguished The Photograph From All Other Pictures Remains Intact.

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.

I See The Bomber Pictures As An Anti-war Statement... Which They Aren't - At All. Pictures Like That Don't Do Anything To Combat War. They Only Show One Tiny Aspect Of The Subject Of War - Maybe Only My Own Childish Feelings Of Fear And Fascination With War And With Weapons Of That Kind.

Politicians Are Nauseating By Definition... They Can Produce Nothing, Neither A Loaf Of Bread Nor A Table Nor A Picture; And This Inability To Create Value, This Total Inferiority, Makes Them Jealous, Vengeful, Insolent And A Menace To Life And Limb.

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.

I Don't Believe In The Reality Of Painting, So I Use Different Styles Like Clothes: It's A Way To Disguise Myself.

The Painter Sees The Semblance Of Things And Repeats It. That Is, Without Fabricating The Things Himself, He Fabricates Their Semblance; And, If That No Longer Recalls Any Object, This Artificially Produced Semblance Functions Only Because It Is Scrutinized For Likeness To A Familiar - That Is, Object-related - Semblance.

Art Is The Highest Form Of Hope.

To Make A Photograph Is Already The First Artificial Act.

The First Colour Charts Were Unsystematic. They Were Based Directly On Commercial Colour Samples. They Were Still Related To Pop Art. In The Canvases That Followed, The Colours Were Chosen Arbitrarily And Drawn By Chance. Then, 180 Tones Were Mixed According To A Given System And Drawn By Chance To Make Four Variations Of 180 Tones. But After That The Number 180 Seemed Too Arbitrary To Me, So I Developed A System Based On A Number Of Rigorously Defined Tones And Proportions.

Well, I Don't Believe There Are Subjects That Can't Be Painted, But There Are A Lot Of Things That I Personally Can't Paint.

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.

It Is A Danger To Wait Around For An Idea To Occur To You. You Have To Find The Idea.

I Believe That Art Has A Kind Of Rightness, As In Music, When We Hear Whether Or Not A Note Is False

I Don't How I Can Describe The Quality That Is Only Found In Art (be It Music, Literature, Painting, Or Whatever), This Quality, It's Just There, And It Endures.

I Pursue No Intentions, No Directions; I Have No Program, No Style And No Mission.

The Desire To Please Is Maligned, Unfairly. There Are Many Sides To It. First Of All, Pictures Have To Arouse Interest Before People Will Even Look At Them, And Then They Have To Show Something That Holds That Interst - And Naturally They Have To Be Presentable, Just As A Song Has To Be Sung Well, Otherwise People Run Away. One Mustn't Underrate This Quality, And I Have Always Been Delighted When My Pieces Have Also Appealed To The Museum Guards, The Laymen.

My Work Has So Much To Do With Reality That I Wanted To Have A Corresponding Rightness. That Excludes Painting In Imitation.

That Was A Piece I Did In 1963 With Konrad Lueg In A Department Store, In The Furniture Department. It Was Announced In Some Papers As An Exhibition Opening, But The People Who Came Didn't Know That It Was To Be A Sort Of Happening. I Don't Think It Is Quite Right That It Has Become So Famous Anyhow. It Was Just A Lot Of Fun, And The Word Itself, Capitalist Realism, Hit Just Right. But It Wasn't Such A Big Deal.

I Believe That The Quintessential Task Of Every Painter In Any Time Has Been To Concentrate On The Essential.

Painting Is The Making Of An Analogy For Something Non-visual And Incomprehensible - Giving It Form And Bringing It Within Reach. And That Is Why Good Paintings Are Incomprehensible. Creating The Incomprehensible Has Absolutely Nothing To Do With Turning Out Any Old Bunkum, Because Bunkum Is Always Comprehensible.

If, While I'm Painting, I Distort Or Destroy A Motif, It Is Not A Planned Or Conscious Act, But Rather It Has A Different Justification: I See The Motif, The Way I Painted It, Is Somehow Ugly Or Unbearable. Then I Try To Follow My Feelings And Make It Attractive. And That Means A Process Of Painting, Changing Or Destroying - For However Long It Takes - Until I Think It Has Improved. And I Don't Demand An Explanation From Myself As To Why This Is So.

I Wanted To Say Something Different: The Pictures Are Also A Leave-taking, In Several Respects. Factually: These Specific Persons Are Dead; As A General Statement, Death Is Leave-taking. And Then Ideologically: A Leave-taking From A Specific Doctrine Of Salvation And, Beyond That, From The Illusion That Unacceptable Circumstances Of Life Can Be Changed By This Conventional Expedient Of Violent Struggle.

Of Course, Pictures Of Objects Also Have This Transcendental Side To Them. Every Object, Being Part Of An Ultimately Incomprehensible World, Also Embodies That World; When Represented In A Picture, The Object Conveys This Mystery All The More Powerfully, The Less Of A 'function' The Picture Has. Hence, For Instance, The Growing Fascination Of Many Beautiful Old Portraits.

A Student Researching Into My Work Has Actually Traced The Newspapers And Magazines Where I Found Theses Images And Has Found Out That Many Of Them Illustrate A Collection Of Gruesome Stories, Murders And Suicides Which Contrast With The Images Used. There Is A Contrast Between The Message Carried By The Text And That Suppressed By The Illustration.

Based On Mixtures Of The Three Primary Colours, Along With Black And White, I Come Up With A Certain Number Of Possible Colours And, By Multiplying These By Two Or Four, I Obtain A Definite Number Of Colour Fields That I Multiply Yet Again By Two, Etc. But The Complete Realization Of This Project Demands A Great Deal Of Time And Work.

Black And White

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.

I Am Thankful That The Church Exists, Thankful That It Has Done Such Great Things, Giving Us Laws, For Instance - 'thou Shalt' And 'thou Shalt Not', And Established Goodness And Evil. That's What All Religions Do, And As Soon As We Try To Replace Them, Worldly Religions Like Fascism And Communism Take Over.

I Have No Motif, Only Motivation. I Believe That Motivation Is The Real Thing, The Natural Thing, And That The Motif Is Old-fashioned, Even Reactionary (as Stupid As The Question About The Meaning Of Life)

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.

When I Look Back On The Townscapes Now, They Do Seem To Me To Recall Certain Images Of The Destruction Of Dresden During The War.

I Started Doing 'figures', Then, One Day, All Of A Sudden, I Started Doing Abstraction. And Then I Started Doing Both. But It Was Never Really A Conscious Decision. It Was Simply A Question Of Desire. In Fact, I Really Prefer Making Figurative Work, But The Figure Is Difficult. So To Work Around The Difficulty I Take A Break And Paint Abstractly. Which I Really Like, By The Way, Because It Allows Me To Make Beautiful Paintings.

I Think Everybody Starts Out By Seeing A Few Works Of Art And Wanting To Do Something Like Them. You Want To Understand What You See, What Is There, And You Try To Make A Picture Out Of It. Later You Realize That You Can't Represent Reality At All - That What You Make Represents Nothing But Itself, And Therefore Is Itself Reality.

A Work Of Art Is Itself An Object, First Of All, And So Manipulation Is Unavoidable: It's A Prerequisite. But I Needed The Greater Objectivity Of The Photograph In Order To Correct My Own Way Of Seeing: For Instance, If I Draw An Object From Nature, I Start To Stylize And To Change It In Accordance With My Personal Vision And My Training. But If I Paint From A Photograph, I Can Forget All The Criteria That I Get From These Sources. I Can Paint Against My Will, As It Were. And That, To Me, Felt Like An Enrichment.

When I Paint From A Photograph, Conscious Thinking Is Eliminated. I Don't Know What I Am Doing. My Work Is Far Closer To The Informel Than To Any Kind Of 'realism'. The Photograph Has An Abstraction Of Its Own, Which Is Not Easy To See Through.

To Believe, One Must Have Lost God. To Paint, One Must Have Lost Art.

I Like Everything That Has No Style: Dictionaries, Photographs, Nature, Myself And My Paintings. (because Style Is Violent, And I Am Not Violent.)

Art Is The Pure Realization Of Religious Feeling, Capacity For Faith, Longing For God. ... The Ability To Believe Is Our Outstanding Quality, And Only Art Adequately Translates It Into Reality. But When We Assuage Our Need For Faith With An Ideology We Court Disaster.

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.

Suddenly, I Saw It In A New Way, As A Picture That Offered Me A New View, Free Of All The Conventional Criteria I Had Always Associated With Art. It Had No Style, No Composition, No Judgment. It Freed Me From Personal Experience. For The First Time, There Was Nothing To It: It Was Pure Picture. That's Why I Wanted To Have It, To Show It - Not Use It As A Means To Painting But Use Painting As A Means To Photography.

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.

Only About One Per Cent Of My Paintings Show Family Members. Do They Help Me Deal With Problems? It's Likely That These Problems Can Only Be Depicted. But Photographs, Private Ones And Others, Keep Appearing That Fascinate Me So Much That I Want To Paint Them. And Sometimes The Real Meaning These Images Have For Me Only Becomes Apparent Later.

Family Photos, Pictures Of Groups, Those Are Truely Wonderful. And They Are Just As Good As The Old Masters, Just As Rich And Just As Beautifully Composed (what Does That Mean Anyway).

A Lot Of Different Things Had To Come Together Over The Years, Accumulated Experiences Of A General And Personal Nature, Before The Idea And The Decision Were Developed And Then Carried Out.

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.

I Often Need A Long Time To Understand Things, To Imagine A Painting I Might Make.

With A Brush You Have Control. The Paint Goes On The Brush And You Make The Mark. From Experience You Know Exactly What Will Happen. With The Squeegee You Lose Control.

Nature/structure. There Is No More To Say. In My Pictures I Reduce To That. But 'reduce' Is The Wrong Word, Because These Are Not Simplifications. I Can't Verbalize What I Am Working On: To Me, It Is Many-layered By Definition; It Is What Is More Important, What Is More True.

If The Abstract Paintings Show My Reality, Then The Landscapes And Still-lifes Show My Yearning.

Abstract Painting

The Reason These Paintings Are Destined For New York Is Not Because I Am Disappointed About A Lack Of German Interest, But Because Moma Asked Me, And Because I Consider It To Be The Best Museum In The World.

I Believe That You Always Have To Believe. It's The Only Way; After All We Both Believe That We Will Do This Exhibition. But I Can't Believe In God, As Such, He's Either Too Big Or Too Small For Me, And Always Incomprehensible, Unbelievable.

Throwaway Snapshots Come Closest To Achieving The State Of Pure Picture.

To Me, Grey Is The Welcome And Only Possible Equivalent For Indifference, Noncommitment, Absence Of Opinion, Absence Of Shape. But Grey, Like Formlessness And The Rest, Can Be Real Only As An Idea, And So All I Can Do Is Create A Colour Nuance That Means Grey But Is Not It. The Painting Is Then A Mixture Of Grey As A Fiction And Grey As A Visible, Designated Area Of Colour.

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.

Almost Every Work Of Art Is An Analogy. When I Make A Representation Of Something, This Too Is An Analogy To What Exists; I Make An Effort To Get A Grip On The Thing By Depicting It. I Prefer To Steer Clear Of Anything Aesthetic, So As Not To Set Obstacles In My Own Way And Not To Have The Problem Of People Saying: 'ah, Yes, That's How He Sees The World, That's His Interpretation.'

Turning To The Colour-classification Methodology: The Starting Point Are The Four Pure Colours Red, Yellow, Green And Blue; Their In-between Shades And Scales Of Brightness Result In Colour Schemes Containing 16, 64, 256 And 1,024 Shades. More Colours Would Be Pointless Because It Wouldn't Be Possible To Distinguish Between Them Clearly.

In 1981, I Think, For The Kunsthalle In Düsseldorf. Before That I Designed A Mirror Room For Kasper König's Westkunst Show, But It Was Never Built. All That Exists Is The Design - Four Mirrors For One Room.

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.

Painting Is Consequently An Almost Blind, Desperate Effort, Like That Of A Person Abandoned, Helpless, In Totally Incomprehensible Surroundings.

I Was A Student, And As Such You Generally Rely On Prior Models Of How To Make Art, But These Were Not Satisfying. Then I Discovered In Photos What Had Been Missing In Paintings; Namely That They Make A Terrific Variety Of Statements And Have Great Substance. That Is What I Wanted To Convey To Paintings And Apply To It.

If I Don't Know What's Coming - That Is, If I Have No Hard-and-fast Image, As I Have With A Photographic Original - Then Arbitrary Choice And Chance Play An Important Part.

My Paintings Are Wiser Than I Am.

Well, The Beginning Is Actually Quite Easy, Because I Can Still Be Quite Free About The Way I Handle Things - Colours, Shapes. And So A Picture Emerges That May Look Quite Good For A While, So Airy And Colourful And New. But That Will Only Last For A Day At Most, At Which Point It Starts To Look Cheap And Fake. And Then The Real Work Begins - Changing, Eradicating, Starting Again, And So On, Until It's Done.

But I Would Like To Reach The Point Where I Could Cut Up An Illustrated Magazine At Random And See To It That The Parts Would Each Become A Painting. I Cannot Properly Explain It Right Now. Already Now I Am Searching For The Most Boring And Irrelevant Photo Material That I Can Find. And I Would Like To Get To The Point Soon Where This Determined Irrelevance Could Be Retained, In Favor Of Something That Would Be Covered Up Otherwise By Artifice.

I Remember That I Felt I Had To Avoid All These Sensational Photos, The Hanged Woman, The Man Who Shot Himself, And So Forth. I Collected A Great Deal Of Material, Including A Number Of Banal, Irrelevant Photos, And Then In The Course Of My Work I Came Back To The Very Pictures I Had Actually Wanted To Avoid, Which Summed Up The Various Stories.

As I See It, All Of Them - Tachists, Action Painters, Informel Artists, And The Rest - Are Only Part Of An Informel Movement That Covers A Lot Of Other Things As Well. I Think There's An Informel Element In Beuys, As Well; But It All Began With Duchamp And Chance, Or With Mondrian, Or With The Impressionists. The Informel Is The Opposite Of The Constructional Quality Of Classicism - The Age Of Kings, Or Clearly Formed Hierarchies.

I Began In 1976, With Small Abstract Paintings That Allowed Me To Do What I Had Never Let Myself Do: Put Something Down At Random. And Then, Of Course, I Realized That It Never Can Be Random. It Was All A Way Of Opening A Door For Me. If I Don't Know What's Coming - That Is, If I Have No Hard-and-fast Image, As I Have With A Photographic Original - Then Arbitrary Choice And Chance Play An Important Part.

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.

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.

But I Have A Problem With The Term 'light'. I Never In My Life Knew What To Do With That. I Know That People Have Mentioned On Some Occasions That 'richter Is All About Light', And That 'the Paintings Have A Special Light', And I Never Knew What They Were Talking About. I Was Never Interested In Light. Light Is There And You Turn It On Or You Turn It Off, With Sun Or Without Sun. I Don't Know What The 'problematic Of Light' Is. I Take It As A Metaphor For A Different Quality, Which Is Similarly Difficult To Describe. Good.

It Can Be A Work By Mondrian, A Piece Of Music By Schönberg Or Mozart, A Painting By Leonardo, Barnett Newman Or Also Jackson Pollock. That's Beautiful To Me. But Also Nature. A Person Can Be Beautiful As Well. And Beauty Is Also Defined As 'untouched'. Indeed, That's An Ideal: That We Humans Are Untouched And Therefore Beautiful.

It's That Same Quality I've Been Talking About. It's Neither Contrived, Nor Surprising And Smart, Not Baffling, Not Witty, Not Interesting, Not Cynical, It Can't Be Planned And It Probably Can't Even Be Described. It's Just Good.

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. It Demonstrates The Endless Multiplicity Of Aspects; It Takes Away Our Certainty, Because It Deprives A Thing Of Its Meaning And Its Name. It Shows Us The Thing In All The Manifold Significance And Infinite Variety That Preclude The Emergence Of Any Single Meaning And View.

Unlike The Photography And Prints, I Never Catalogued, Kept Track Of Or Exhibited The Sketches. I Sold Some Occasionally, But Never Saw Myself As A Graphic Artist. They Became More Important To Me Thanks To The Exhibition, However, And I Realized That These Drawings Were Quite Interesting After All.

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.

The Grey Is Certainly Inspired By The Photo-paintings, And, Of Course, It's Related To The Fact That I Think Grey Is An Important Colour - The Ideal Colour For Indifference, Fence-sitting, Keeping Quiet, Despair. In Other Words, For States Of Being And Situations That Affect One, And For Which One Would Like To Find A Visual Expression.

The Year Is Always Correct, Also The Month, Only The Day Can Be Another. But That Occurs To Me Only In The Moment Of Writing It Down.

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.

Abstract Pictures Are Fictive Models, Because They Make Visible A Reality That We Can Neither See Nor Describe, But Whose Existence We Can Postulate.

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.

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.

Painting Is Traditional But For Me That Doesn't Mean The Academy. I Felt A Need To Paint; I Love Painting. It Was Something Natural - As Is Listening To Music Or Playing An Instrument For Some People. For This Reason I Searched For Themes Of My Era And My Generation. Photography Offered This, So I Chose It As A Medium For Painting.

Above All, It's Never Blind Chance: It's A Chance That Is Always Planned, But Also Always Surprising. And I Need It In Order To Carry On, In Order To Eradicate My Mistakes, To Destroy What I've Worked Out Wrong, To Introduce Something Different And Disruptive. I'm Often Astonished To Find How Much Better Chance Is Than I Am.

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.

There Was No Special Event That Made Me Decide. I Had Collected Some Photos And The Idea Was In The Back Of My Mind For A Long Time. It Was Growing And Growing, So Finally I Said, 'i Must Paint This.' I Come From East Germany And Am Not A Marxist, So Of Course At The Time I Had No Sympathy For The Ideas, Or For The Ideology That These People Represented. I Couldn't Understand, But I Was Still Impressed. Like Everyone, I Was Touched. It Was An Exceptional Moment For Germany.

Illusion - Or Rather Appearance, Semblance - Is The Theme Of My Life (could Be Theme Of Speech Welcoming Freshmen To The Academy). All That Is, Seems, And Is Visible To Us Because We Perceive It By The Reflected Light Of Semblance. Nothing Else Is Visible.

The Urge To Break With A Tradition Is Only Appropriate When You're Dealing With An Outdated, Troublesome Tradition: I Never Really Thought About That Because I Take The Old-fashioned Approach Of Equating Tradition With Value (which May Be A Failing). But Whatever The Case, Positive Tradition Can Also Provoke Opposition If It's Too Powerful, Too Overwhelming, Too Demanding. That Would Basically Be About The Human Side Of Wanting To Hold Your Own.

I Originally Came From Dresden, Where Socialist Realism Prevailed. Konrad Lueg And I Came Up With It, For The Most Part Ironically, Since I Now Live In Capitalism. It Was Certainly 'realism', But In Another Form - The Capitalist Form, As It Were. It Wasn't Meant That Seriously. It Was More A Slogan For That Particular Happening At A Furniture Store.

Perhaps The Choice Is A Negative One, In That I Was Trying To Avoid Everything That Touched On Well-known Issues - Or Any Issues At All, Whether Painterly, Social Or Aesthetic. I Tried To Find Nothing Too Explicit, Hence All The Banal Subjects; And Then, Again, I Tried To Avoid Letting The Banal Turn Into My Issue And My Trademark. So It's All Evasive Action, In A Way.

I Am Ridiculously Old-fashioned.

I Wanted To Make It As Anonymous As A Photo. But It Was Perhaps Also The Wish For Perfection, The Unapproachable, Which Then Means Loss Of Immediacy. Something Is Missing Then, Though; That Is Why I Gave That Up.

Of Course I Constantly Despair At My Own Incapacity, At The Impossibility Of Ever Accomplishing Anything, Of Painting A Valid, True Picture Or Even Knowing What Such A Thing Ought To Look Like. But Then I Always Have The Hope That, If I Persevere, It Might One Day Happen. And This Hope Is Nurtured Every Time Something Appears, A Scattered, Partial, Initial Hint Of Something Which Reminds Me Of What I Long For, Or Which Conveys A Hint Of It – Although Often Enough I Have Been Fooled By A Momentary Glimpse That Then Vanishes, Leaving Behind Only The Usual Thing.

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.

Abstract Painting

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.

They Are Specific Places I Have Discovered Here And There When I Am On The Road To Take Photos. I Go Especially To Take Photos.

Pictures Are The Idea In Visual Or Pictorial Form; And The Idea Has To Be Legible, Both In The Individual Picture And In The Collective Context - Which Presupposes, Of Course, That Words Are Used To Convey Information About The Idea And The Context. However, None Of This Means That Pictures Function As Illustrations Of An Idea: Ultimately, They Are The Idea. Nor Is The Verbal Formulation Of The Idea A Translation Of The Visual: It Simply Bears A Certain Resemblance To The Meaning Of The Idea. It Is An Interpretation, Literally A Reflection.

I'm Trying To Paint A Picture Of What I Have Seen And What Moved Me, As Well As I Can. That's All.

I Don't Create Blurs. Blurring Is Not The Most Important Thing; Nor Is It An Identity Tag For My Pictures.

It Was Not Possible For Us To Produce The Same Optimism And The Same Kind Of Humour Or Irony. Actually, It Was Not Irony. Lichtenstein Is Not Ironic But He Does Have A Special Kind Of Humour. That's How I Could Describe It: Humour And Optimism. For Polke And Me, Everything Was More Fragmented. But How It Was Broken Up Is Hard To Describe.

I Didn't Actually Know What The Protesters In The West Really Wanted. It Was Fantastic Here, So Much Freedom, And That Was What They Were Calling Musty, Middle-class, And Fascistic, A Bleak Period. Bleak Was What The Gdr Was, And It Alone Had Adopted, Almost Unchanged, Nazi Germany's Methods Of Intimidation And Ideas About Propaganda And The Use Of Force.

When I First Painted A Number Of Canvases Grey All Over (about Eight Years Ago), I Did So Because I Did Not Know What To Paint, Or What There Might Be To Paint: So Wretched A Start Could Lead To Nothing Meaningful. As Time Went On, However, I Observed Differences Of Quality Among The Grey Surfaces - And Also That These Betrayed Nothing Of The Destructive Motivation That Lay Behind Them. The Pictures Began To Teach Me. By Generalizing A Personal Dilemma, They Resolved It.

I Go To The Studio Every Day, But I Dont Paint Every Day. I Love Playing With My Architectural Models. I Love Making Plans. I Could Spend My Life Arranging Things.

I Want Pictorial Content Without Sentiment, But I Want It As Human As Possible

Art Is Not A Substitute Religion: It Is A Religion (in The True Sense Of The Word: 'binding Back', 'binding' To The Unknowable, Transcending Reason, Transcendent Being). But The Church Is No Longer Adequate As A Means Of Affording Experience Of The Transcendental, And Of Making Religion Real - And So Art Has Been Transformed From A Means Into The Sole Provider Of Religion: Which Means Religion Itself.

This Superficial Blurring Has Something To Do With The Incapacity I Have Just Mentioned. I Can Make No Statement About Reality Clearer Than My Own Relationship To Reality; And This Has A Great Deal To Do With Imprecision, Uncertainty, Transience, Incompleteness, Or Whatever. But This Doesn't Explain The Pictures. At Best It Explains What Led To Their Being Painted.

I First Came Up With The Idea For The Colour-chart Pictures Back In 1966, And My Preoccupation With The Topic Culminated In 1974 With A Painting That Consisted Of 4,096 Colour Fields. Initially I Was Attracted By The Typical Pop Art Aestheticism Of Using Standard Colour-sample Cards; I Preferred The Unartistic, Tasteful And Secular Illustration Of The Different Tones To The Paintings Of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, Etc.

Painting Is My Profession, Because It Has Always Been The Thing That Interested Me Most. I'm Of A Certain Age, I Come From A Different Tradition And, In Any Case, I Can't Do Anything Else. I'm Still Very Sure That Painting Is One Of The Most Basic Human Capacities, Like Dancing And Singing, That Make Sense, That Stay With Us, As Something Human.

I Believe That He Knew More What He Was Doing. I Might Be Absolutely Wrong About This, But That Was My Impression.

Art Is The Ideal Medium For Making Contact With The Transcendental, Or At Least For Getting Close To It.

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.

The Atlas Belongs To The Lenbachhaus In Munich - It's Long Since Ceased To Belong To Me. Occasionally I Run Across It Somewhere, And I Think It's Interesting Because It Looks Different Each Time.

... Landscapes Or Still-lifes I Paint In Between The Abstract Works; They Constitute About One-tenth Of My Production. On The One Hand They Are Useful, Because I Like To Work From Nature - Although I Do Use A Photograph - Because I Think That Any Detail From Nature Has A Logic I Would Like To See In Abstraction As Well.

Painting Is Another Form Of Thinking.

Contact With Like-minded Painters - A Group Means A Great Deal To Me: Nothing Comes In Isolation. We Have Worked Out Our Ideas Largely By Talking Them Through. Shutting Myself Away In The Country, For Instance, Would Do Nothing For Me. One Depends On One's Surroundings. And So The Exchange With Other Artists - And Especially The Collaboration With Lueg And Polke - Matters A Lot To Me: It Is Part Of The Input That I Need.

Weeks Go By, And I Dont Paint Until Finally I Cant Stand It Any Longer. I Get Fed Up. I Almost Dont Want To Talk About It, Because I Dont Want To Become Self-conscious About It, But Perhaps I Create These Little Crises As A Kind Of A Secret Strategy To Push Myself.

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.

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.

My Method Is Related To An Attempt To Do Something That Might Be Understood By Today's World, Or That Could At Least Provide Understanding. In Other Words, Doing Something I Understand And That Everyone Understands. This Natural Desire For Communication Is Also Found In Other Domains, Like Reading And Discourse, Etc. I Also Hate Repeating Myself; It Gives Me No Pleasure Whatsoever. Once I've Understood Something, I Need To Start Off On New Ground.

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.

Composition Is A Side Issue. Its Role In My Selection Of Photographs Is A Negative One At Best. By Which I Mean That The Fascination Of A Photograph Is Not In Its Eccentric Composition But In What It Has To Say: Its Information Content. And, On The Other Hand, Composition Always Also Has Its Own Fortuitous Rightness.

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.

These Pictures Possibly Give Rise To Questions Of Political Content Or Historical Truth. Neither Interests Me In This Instance. And Although Even My Motivation For Painting Them Is Probably Of No Significance, I Am Trying To Put A Name To It Here, As An Articulation, Parallel To The Pictures, As It Were, Of My Disquiet And Of My Opinion.

My Pictures Are Devoid Of Objects; Like Objects, They Are Themselves Objects. This Means That They Are Devoid Of Content, Significance Or Meaning, Like Objects Or Trees, Animals, People Or Days, All Of Which Are There Without A Reason, Without A Function And Without A Purpose. This Is The Quality That Counts. Even So, There Are Good And Bad Pictures.

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.

As A Matter Of Fact, It Was Only Through The Dealer Fred Jahn That I Succeeded In Overcoming My Reservation About The Works On Paper And Exhibiting Them. Added To This, Of Course, Was The Fact That After Ten Years I Could See The Watercolours In A Different Light, And In Conjunction With Pictures Painted Afterwards, They Had At Least Become More Comprehensible To Me.

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.

All Photographs Are Far More Important Than Any Painting.

When I Make A Representation Of Something, This, Too, Is An Analogy To What Exists; I Make An Effort To Get A Grip On The Thing By Depicting It.

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.

I Choose Depending On The Way I Feel; Randomly, In Other Words. When I Haven't Done Anything For A Long Time, I Always Start Small, On Paper.

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.

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.

Art Shows Us How To See Things That Are Constructive And Good, And To Be An Active Part Of That.

I Believe I Am Looking For Rightness. My Work Has So Much To Do With Reality That I Wanted To Have A Corresponding Rightness. That Excludes Painting In Imitation. In Nature Everything Is Always Right: The Structure Is Right, The Proportions Are Good, The Colours Fit The Forms. If You Imitate That In Painting, It Becomes False.

The Truth... When They Have A Similar Structure To And Are Organized In As Truthful A Way As Nature. When I Look Out Of The Window, Then Truth For Me Is The Way Nature Shows Itself In Its Various Tones, Colours And Proportions. That's A Truth And Has Its Own Correctness. This Little Slice Of Nature, And In Fact Any Given Piece Of Nature, Represents To Me An Ongoing Challenge, And Is A Model For My Paintings.

Grey. It Makes No Statement Whatever; It Evokes Neither Feelings Nor Associations: It Is Really Neither Visible Nor Invisible. Its Inconspicuousness Gives It The Capacity To Mediate, To Make Visible, In A Positively Illusionistic Way, Like A Photograph. It Has The Capacity That No Other Colour Has, To Make 'nothing' Visible.

How Could One Be In This World Without Feeling Dismayed By It? Even If One Paints Flowers And Gingerbread.

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.

In The Beginning I Tried To Accommodate Everything There That Was Somewhere Between Art And Garbage And That Somehow Seemed Important To Me And A Pity To Throw Away. After A While, Some Sheets In The Atlas Acquired Another Value, After All - That Is, It Seemed To Me That They Could Stand On Their Own Terms, Not Only Under The Protection Of The Atlas.

And Then The Work Bears A Strong Sense Of Leave-taking For Me Personally. It Ends The Work I Began In The 1960s (paintings From Black-and-white Photographs), With A Compressed Summation That Precludes Any Possible Continuation. And So It Is A Leave-taking From Thoughts And Feelings Of My Own On A Very Basic Level. Not That This Is A Deliberate Act, Of Course; It Is A Quasi-automatic Sequence Of Disintegration And Reformation Which I Can Perceive, As Always, Only In Retrospect.

Black And White

What Attracted Me About My Mirrors Was The Idea Of Having Nothing Manipulated In Them. A Piece Of Bought Mirror. Just Hung There, Without Any Addition, To Operate Immediately And Directly. Even At The Risk Of Being Boring. Mere Demonstration. The Mirrors, And Even More The Panes Of Glass, Were Also Certainly Directed Against Duchamp, Against His Large Glass.

My Landscapes Are Not Only Beautiful, Or Nostalgic, With A Romantic Or Classical Suggestion Of Lost Paradises, But Above All 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I Mean The Glorifying Way We Look At Nature. Nature, Which 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.

I Pursue No Objectives, No Systems, No Tendency; I Have No Program, No Style, No Direction. I Have No Time For Specialized Concerns, Working Themes, Or Variations That Lead To Mastery. I Steer Clear Of Definitions. I Don’t Know What I Want. I Am Inconsistent, Non-committal, Passive; I Like The Indefinite, The Boundless; I Like Continual Uncertainty.

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