Art Is The Highest Form Of Hope.

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.

There Was No Special Event That Made Me Decide. I Had Collected Some Photos And The Idea Was In The Back Of My Mind For A Long Time. It Was Growing And Growing, So Finally I Said, 'i Must Paint This.' I Come From East Germany And Am Not A Marxist, So Of Course At The Time I Had No Sympathy For The Ideas, Or For The Ideology That These People Represented. I Couldn't Understand, But I Was Still Impressed. Like Everyone, I Was Touched. It Was An Exceptional Moment For Germany.

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.

I Remember That I Felt I Had To Avoid All These Sensational Photos, The Hanged Woman, The Man Who Shot Himself, And So Forth. I Collected A Great Deal Of Material, Including A Number Of Banal, Irrelevant Photos, And Then In The Course Of My Work I Came Back To The Very Pictures I Had Actually Wanted To Avoid, Which Summed Up The Various Stories.

Architecture Was, Or Is, A Kind Of Hobby, An Inclination I Have To Fiddling Around And Building Things. Putting Up Shelves Or Cupboards, Or Making Tools, Or Designing Houses ... It Always Has A Functional Or Social Motivation. If Social Changes Are In The Air, I Am Gripped Immediately By The Desire To Build, And I Think That I Accelerate Or Anticipate Changes In My Life By Doing So, At Least In Draft. In The Case Of My House, That Was Anticipation: In Other Words, First Build, Then Change One's Life.