Richter, Gerhard

Modern art has always only shown itself to me in trends and blowhards, so I couldn't be a modern artist. There were always powerful movements or groups that today we don't even know anymore.

I can't always reach the image in my mind.. almost never, in fact.. so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread.

I have to have a mental picture, an image, to start. I never reach this image, but it's good to begin with it.

What I'm attempting in each picture is nothing other than this.. to bring together in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom.

The tough part is always at the end. The beginning is always easy.

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.

It has to do with the surface of both, which at the end becomes erased, or more erased. Before that, they were richer, full of things. Uglier, but more precise maybe.

I would do different jobs. I didn't want to have to make paintings I would be paid for, nor did I want to have to be nice to a dealer.

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.

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