How did you come up with the idea to paint these blurred photos?
I was a student, and as such you generally rely on prior models of how to make art, but these were not satisfying. Then I discovered in photos what had been missing in paintings; namely that they make a terrific variety of statements and have great substance. That is what I wanted to convey to paintings and apply to it.
SOURCE
Interview with Christiane Vielhaber, 1986
For me Richter blurred paintings are awe-inspiring. The fact that he is as happy to paint something that is an (improved) version of an existing photo as well as extremely colourful paintings.
I was interested to read he's been criticised for the variety in his works and techniques. He originally worked from colour charts. He proficiency of paint knowledge means he has can layer up his 'squeegee' paintings with different colours, avoiding cracking dependent on the drying rates of the different pigments. He also peels off layers of paint
I found his website with a huge number of quotes and book to be a fascinating insight into an artist not shy about talking about his work.
The overpainting works I only came across more recently. I like the idea of changing the impact and interpretation of a piece with spontaneous abstracted bold marks. I particularly like the surreal quality of the photo above with the alpine landscape. It's a picture postcard view that has been given a vivid makeover that makes you look twice
Sometimes your abstract paintings give the impression of a landscape. Are you looking for realism again in abstraction?
I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.
SOURCE
Interview with Anna Tilroe, 1987
Chance as a theme and as method. A method of allowing something objective to come into being; a theme for creating a simile (picture) of our survival strategy:
(1) The living method, which not only processes conditions, qualities and events as they chance to happen, but exists solely as that non-static 'process', and in no other way.
(2) Ideological: denial of the planning, the opinion and the world-view whereby social projects, and subsequently 'big pictures', are created. So what I have often seen as a deficiency on my part – the fact that I've never been in a position to 'form a picture' of something – is not incapacity at all but an instinctive effort to get at a more modern truth: one that we are already living out in our lives (life is not what is said but the saying of it, not the picture but the picturing).
SOURCE
Notes, 1989
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