Non-Representational Art Quotes

I often avoid using the terms 'figuration' and 'abstraction' because I've always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting - you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.

Colored planes, by their position and size as well as by their value, express only relationships, not forms.

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

The highest art is no art. The best form is no form.

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.

It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.

Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

My forms are geometric, but they don't interact in a geometric sense. They're just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don't see them.

Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.

I carry out my work thus: I never use models or nature for the figure, drapery or anything else.

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

Objective art is just the opposite. The man has nothing to throw, he is utterly empty, absolutely clean. Out of this silence, out of this emptiness, arises love, compassion, and out of this silence a possibility for creativity. This silence, this love, this compassion, these are the qualities of meditation.

In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.

When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed: 'Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!'

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.

Because a work does not aim at reproducing natural appearances it is not, therefore, an escape from life -- but may be a penetration into reality...as expression of the significance of life, a stimulation to greater effort in living.

I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.

I'm interested in Jackson Pollock's kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it's nothing, and yet it's incredible.