Gerhard Richter Quotes

It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all.

People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like.

"I see nobody on the road," said Alice. "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light."

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 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.

Compromise in colors is grey.

If you don't get noticed, you don't have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks.

I like photographs which leave something to the imagination.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

If art can be at the service of anything, it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way.

I like it when one is not certain what one sees. When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion.

I think art should stand in its own neutral place, because I think that's how reality always is - it's this duality of being both hopeless and also full of hope.

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

That's the thing about conspiracy theories: in a comforting sort of way, they give rise to the feeling that someone, somewhere, knows what's going on.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

It's up to us as photographers to give voice to the natural world.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

I am always surprised at all the things people read into my photos, but it also amuse me. That may be because I have nothing specific in mind when I'm working. My intentions are neither feminist nor political. I try to put double or multiple meanings into my photos, which might give rise to a greater variety of interpretations.

Just 'cause you can't see me don't mean I gone away.

In the dark, all cats are grey.

Glamour is translucent — not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn’t give us a completely clear picture.

The camera gives you some control.

We can't be certain who the villains are cuz everyone's so pretty, but the after party's sure to be the wing-ding as it moves into your city.