Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)

‘Abstract paintings are like fictitious models because they visualise a reality which we can neither see nor describe but which we nevertheless conclude exists. We attract negative names to this reality: the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted it in terms of absolute images like heaven and hell... Paintings are better the more intelligent, the more beautiful, the more mad, the more extreme, the more evident, the more incomprehensible their way of showing this incomprehensible reality’
(G. Richter, ‘Statement’, Documenta 7, Kassel, 1982, unpaged).