Gerhard Richter Quotes

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

I paint my own reality.

My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences.

Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.

Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.

All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.

Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

Man needs music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

I want it to be more universal than that - like a painter doesn't have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.

The arts can bring the heart to the aid of the head, the personal to the political.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

Ah! My dear friend painting is to us what the music of Berlioz and Wagner was before us - a consolatory art for sore hearts! And yet there are only a few like you and me who feel it!!!

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.