Gerhard Richter, Christa and Wolfi, 1964, oil on canvas, 59 x 51 1/4 in., Art Institute of Chicago, Photo by Kent Baldner via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

In Their Own Words: Gerhard Richter

“When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don’t know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of ‘realism’. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.”

Gerhard Richter