Gerhard Richter Quotes

Painting is another form of thinking.

Gerhard Richter

• Thinking
• Painting
• Form

Art serves to establish community. It links us with others and with the things around us, in a shared vision and effort.

Gerhard Richter

• Art
• Community
• Effort

I pursue no intentions, no directions; I have no program, no style and no mission.

Gerhard Richter

• Style
• Program
• Mission

It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.

Gerhard Richter

• Idea
• Find
• Occur

I believe that the quintessential task of every painter in any time has been to concentrate on the essential.

Gerhard Richter

• Painter
• Task
• Concentrate

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.

Gerhard Richter

• Work
• Understand
• Analogy

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.

Gerhard Richter

• Art
• Reality
• Realization

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

Gerhard Richter

• Reality
• Pictures
• Abstract

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.

Gerhard Richter

• Language
• Communicate
• Express

My paintings are wiser than I am.

Gerhard Richter

• Paintings
• Wiser

To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.

Gerhard Richter

• Believe
• Lost
• Paint

Art is the highest form of hope.

Gerhard Richter

• Art
• Hope
• Form