Gerhard Quotes
I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.
We made a decision that monetary policy will be made by an independent European Central Bank.
You shouldn't do science just to improve wealth - do science for the sake of human culture and knowledge. There must be some purpose in life that is higher than just surviving.
It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.
A lot of different things had to come together over the years, accumulated experiences of a general and personal nature, before the idea and the decision were developed and then carried out.
I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)
If you want to touch the hearts of people you can't do that with newspapers or with radio, you have to do it with TV.
Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.
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.
As long as we want to be different from what God wants us to be at the time, we are only tormenting ourselves to no purpose.
We must take care that globalization does not become something people become afraid of.
My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.
Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.
The year is always correct, also the month, only the day can be another. But that occurs to me only in the moment of writing it down.
How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread.
Family photos, pictures of groups, those are truely wonderful. And they are just as good as the old masters, just as rich and just as beautifully composed (what does that mean anyway).
Art shows us how to see things that are constructive and good, and to be an active part of that.
The Atlas belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich - it's long since ceased to belong to me. Occasionally I run across it somewhere, and I think it's interesting because it looks different each time.
Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.
With a brush you have control. The paint goes on the brush and you make the mark. From experience you know exactly what will happen. With the squeegee you lose control.
I choose depending on the way I feel; randomly, in other words. When I haven't done anything for a long time, I always start small, on paper.
I don't believe in the reality of painting, so I use different styles like clothes: it's a way to disguise myself.
When I make a representation of something, this, too, is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it.
The preaching of Jesus Christ and him crucified on account of sinners is Gods desired way of being God.
I can't let important policy decisions hinge on the fact that an election is coming up every 90 days.
If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.
I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.
I believe that the quintessential task of every painter in any time has been to concentrate on the essential.
Cage is much more disciplined. He made chance a method and used it in constructive ways; I never did that. Everything here is a little more chaotic.
Our future begins on January 1 1999. The euro is Europe's key to the 21st century. The era of solo national fiscal and economic policy is over.
Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.
We want to change the way we help unemployed people find jobs. We want to be faster and more goal oriented.
When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals.
I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.
