Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)

"In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy - all the resources of art, in fact - in order to depict 'nothing'. So, in dealing with this inexplicable reality, the lovelier, cleverer, madder, extremer, more visual and more incomprehensible the analogy, the better the picture. Art is the highest form of hope" (G. Richter, "Interview with Gerhard Richter," exh. cat., Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, ed. Robert Storr, New York, 2002, p. 100).